Chris Cooper's Blog, page 52

The Un-Sexy (but Totally Effective) Way to Build Wealth as a Gym Owner

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Get rich quick, seven figure revenue tips, overnight millionaire: If you’re looking for that stuff, you’re actually listening to the wrong podcast. But I’m still going to tell you how to create wealth as a gym owner. Today, on “Run a Profitable Gym,” we’re going to talk about the un-sexy approach to building income. I’m not going to try to sell you on my secret wealth-building formula, and my guest doesn’t have any hot crypto tips—that I know of. But if you listen, you’re going to find out how gym owners can increase income and net worth and even become millionaires. That does happen regularly. Two-Brain has actually certified 43 millionaires and counting. First, stats. I always give you hard data on this show. Two-Brain’s most recent leaderboard tracked net owner benefit. It was over three months, so these aren’t one-hit-wonders. This is a three-month average.

Mike Warkentin (00:44):
It’s salary, dividends, whatever else your gym pays for—that could be your car or a phone or whatever. Our top 10 ran from $16,000 to $59,000. Now remember, that isn’t gross revenue. That’s what the gym owner actually earned per month. Those are great numbers. We’re going to dig into them today. How do gym owners do it? Well, my guest is going to tell you. His name is Nick Beal. He runs CrossFit Casco Bay. There are two locations, and one of them is in Portland, Maine, not Oregon. It’s on the other side. So, Nick, welcome to the show. How are you?

Nick Beal (01:12):
I’m doing great, man. How’re you doing?

Mike Warkentin (01:14):
I’m doing wonderful, and I’m really excited to chat with you about this. I’m just going to jump right in, so gym owners get some of the info that they need. Before the show, I read that your success generating income comes from like the un-sexy stuff and doing it consistently. What do you mean by that? What’s un-sexy stuff?

Nick Beal (01:30):
Yeah, I think that comment really comes from the things we learned in the gym when our members bring those Instagram posts in, and they’re like, “Hey, I want to do this workout.” And you’re just like, “That’s not going to help you.” Sometimes you just got to stick with the basics. What I mean by that, from a gym perspective, we really just know our numbers. We have our systems in place. We stick to them. When that shiny object comes up that we see on Instagram of like, “Oh, that’s a cool idea, let’s do it.” Just remembering that, you know, sticking to your day-to-day systems is what’s going to get that compounding effect of growth.

Mike Warkentin (02:02):
And it’s funny because that doesn’t fire you up. You’re like, “Oh, I’ve got to invest in crypto, and I’ve got to do this thing, and I’ve got to whatever—buy this building.” But I just talked to Chris Cooper, actually right before the show. We talked about building wealth as a gym owner. And that slow, steady approach actually works way better. And the flash in the pan stuff, it’s always too good to be true. Tell me about a couple of the shiny objects that might have tempted you. You mentioned seeing some stuff that maybe would’ve taken you off that slow and steady path. What are some of the shiny objects that pop up for you?

Nick Beal (02:29):
I mean, I think as a gym owner and anybody that owns their own business, there’s always ideas and thoughts that come in your head—things you can think you can do. I mean, it’s natural for us to have an idea and want to run with it, but we’ve got to stick with just a few of them. Some examples: I mean, it’s just like, you know, trying to run flashy promos all the time, discounts, like, “How am I going to get 50 new members next month? That’d be awesome.” It’s like, well, 50 members in a month, hey, maybe it happens—awesome if you do it—but over time, I found it’s like, “Hey, how do I just make sure that I’m netting two to three?” You know? And over time, as you’re doing it long enough, that adds up quite a bit.

Mike Warkentin (03:07):
Yeah. And my personal story on that is: We ran a six-week challenge. The first time we did it, we acquired, it was like, I think it was like 35 or 40 members. We had a really huge month in the gym. I think it was our all-time record that we’ve never surpassed. Most of those people left after the six weeks or even before the six weeks were done. They were long gone, never to be heard from again. They were onto the next thing. And that was a failure on our part to retain them, but it was also one of those things where we sold them a six-week challenge, and when they were done, they were done. But then I’ve talked to other gym owners like you, where they’re adding two or three members net per month. They’re retaining them for about two years, and they’re charging in the range of like $300 per member or something like that. That’s how you build these incredible businesses. Does that kind of describe what you’re doing?

Nick Beal (03:48):
Oh, yeah, for sure. And you’re always taking in effect—in this situation—of, you know, what is 30 new members going to do to your gym? You know, the people who are already there. Your foundational base of members. If you’re changing up the product now, and they have double the amount of people in their class, that kind of shifts up the product that they signed up for. So, a slow steady approach usually allows for a nice progression into the end of the change.

Mike Warkentin (04:15):
Tell me a little bit about your business. You said you’ve got two locations. Tell me a little bit about what you sell specifically. If you’ve got any stats, do you want to toss out about, like members or average revenue per member? Anything you’re comfortable sharing? Give us the rundown of what your operation does.

Nick Beal (04:27):
Yeah, our bread and butter is group class. We were a CrossFit gym through and through. And I really—we had always done a little bit of personal training, like we do nutrition. We really didn’t start diversifying our product offerings until we started working with Two-Brain, and now we’ve integrated into kind of almost building a secondary business within our business. It’s—how do we work our personal training and our semi-private into our day-to-day has really been the focus of our past year of growth. We came in with group classes taking care of us, like we were doing very well. And the addition of personal training and semi-private has kind of propelled us into that next bracket of income. So that’s kind of the structure of the offerings that we have and kind of how we phased them in.

Mike Warkentin (05:19):
And you said two locations. How long have you had both of those?

Nick Beal (05:22):
Yeah, I purchased my first gym in 2014. That’s the Portland location. And then I was lucky enough to purchase the second one in 2019 right before 2020, so that was a fun adventure.

Mike Warkentin (05:36):
I bet, I bet. And did I hear that you actually have one of your buildings—you’ve acquired one of your buildings?

Nick Beal (05:41):
Yeah. It was a fun two-year process that finally panned out last Tuesday, actually.

Mike Warkentin (05:49):
Oh, congrats.

Nick Beal (05:50):
So, yeah. Yeah. So now we have the fun project of repositioning the property because it has some residential units within it that we can tap into. So.

Mike Warkentin (06:01):
Okay. So, that’s super interesting. I bet all the fun was involving lawyers and zoning and all the other things, I’m sure. Right?

Nick Beal (06:06):
Yeah. And then involving municipalities, which is always fun when you get the government involved. There were some discrepancies on boundary lines of who owned what. So, when you start learning how to read old English deeds from the 1800s, it’s—you don’t think that owning a gym, you’re going to have to start kind of diving into that stuff, but you know.

Mike Warkentin (06:26):
Did you actually have to—is that what it got to, like 1800s deeds?

Nick Beal (06:29):
Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Herein and thenceforth and all these different, you know—

Mike Warkentin (06:35):
And 12 cattle delivered on the first of every month to the landowner?

Nick Beal (06:38):
Yeah. And I’m trying to find granite pegs within the parking lot. And it’s—oh, it was an adventure, but we got—

Mike Warkentin (06:46):
Wow. That’s a cool Maine story.

Nick Beal (06:47):
Yeah. We were persistent, and we figured it out.

Mike Warkentin (06:50):
I like that. That’s inter—that’s great. I’ve never been to Maine, but I love the East Coast of the U.S., and there’s some cool stories up in there. So, I love the granite pigs in the parking lot.

Nick Beal (06:59):
Yeah. Yeah. We acquired a property that was once part of four different properties. So, when it got broken up and split up, there’s paper roads and all these weird things we had to account for. But no, we were persistent, and we made sure we had a home for our gym for the next, you know, however long I want to keep it.

Mike Warkentin (07:20):
That’s pretty cool. And that building—you know, one of Chris Cooper’s strategies is to buy and hold real estate—that building, if you decide, let’s say, “I want to sell the gym.” You sell the gym: That business still pays you rent if you want; you could rent it out to something else. You could pass this on to the kids, and they’ll get rent. Buying a building is an interesting way to create and grow net worth, and a lot of gym owners have done that. It doesn’t work in every part of the country. Las Vegas real estate is probably a crazy price that you maybe don’t want to get into that necessarily, but it is one strategy. Talk to me a little bit about your net worth—or sorry, not net worth, but net owner benefit. How has that changed over time? Like, when I started as a gym owner, my net owner benefit was zero. And for a long time, it stayed zero because it was a bad hobby. And then eventually when I started working with Two-Brain, it started to go up. Talk to me about how your numbers changed.

Nick Beal (08:06):
Yeah. I think it kind of goes right back to the beginning of our conversation of how it’s been slow and steady. I remember when I first bought the gym, and I was working another job, and I wasn’t taking any money out of the business.

Mike Warkentin (08:18):
What did you do?

Nick Beal (08:19):
I worked at an advertising agency. So, I was an account manager working as a middleman between the company and our company. So just dealt with everybody’s problems. Got me ready to own a gym. But so, I was in the advertising world and then slowly transitioned into owning or doing the gym full-time. And it was just year after year; I’ve just focused on trying to continuously grow the gym in a way that, with the growth, my net owner benefit is growing as well. And I was fortunate enough to have some systems set up in the beginning that it kind of was—I wasn’t just making more money and pushing it out the door. It’s like my pie grew, and the percentages were in the right spot.

Mike Warkentin (09:05):
Okay. And listeners, one of the things that often happens when gym owners get more revenue is they don’t pay themselves. In an odd way, we decide to buy Salt bikes and SkiErgs and sandbags and maybe a new sign for the building and then some other stuff, renovations. That’s all good. But you deserve to get compensated from your business for all the work you put in. And so, one of the things—“Profit First” is a really interesting strategy. John Briggs wrote “Profit First for Microgyms.” A lot of that is paying yourself first because if you don’t eat, your client and your staff aren’t going to eat either. And so, protecting some of that income for yourself is a really important thing. When you were growing this number, were there any big milestones that—you said it was slow and steady—but was there anything that like you could look back on and say, “Ah, that was a thing that really had some downstream effects?” Or was it just that slow, steady snowball building over time?

Nick Beal (09:58):
Yeah. Honestly, I don’t—I can’t point to like, “Hey, that was the one thing that did it.” Yeah, it would—I think it would be a lie if I was like, “Hey, this is the secret to it.” It was really just doing everything right and continuously making improvements along the way. We’re always, like I said, like when we talked about, “Hey, we’re always doing the un-sexy things, and we’re just consistently doing it.” It’s like, well, we’re always assessing those systems. We’re always looking at—each week, we start off our week by looking at, “Hey, these are the numbers from last week.” And then extrapolating kind of like, “Hey, well, why were our leads down this much? Why was our conversion only here?” And like seeing where we can make some improvements and tinkering with it along the way. So, we have our systems in place, but they’re not done. They’re never done. So, we’re always looking and say, “How do we make the things that we have in place a little better?” And by continuously making the product up a little better over time, we found that it translated into that growth.

Mike Warkentin (10:52):
So, I’ll point it out for you. You just summarized it, but the major thing that you did to increase your net owner benefit over time—the big milestone—was deciding to be consistent about your business. And that’s just doing it over and over again because a lot of people aren’t. We get crazy about something, go over there, do this thing, push through it, and then go to the next thing. And then try Facebook ads for a little while, then try ChatGPT, and just get crazy—and going from thing to thing to thing and never dedicating yourself to that consistency. And that’s what really—when I talk to gym owners who really do well, it’s always that firm foundation and then a commitment to always shoring it up, building a little bit higher, shoring up the foundation a little bit higher, a little bit higher.

Mike Warkentin (11:28):
And then they get these gigantic pyramids of businesses that are incredible, and they’re always rising. But I never see these rocket ships where it’s like, “All of a sudden, I’ve got 500 members, and I’m wealthy.” It’s never that. It’s always something that’s very consistent. So, gym owners, if you’re out there, it’s 1% improvement every day. Do something to grow your business every day. Chris Cooper’s written about this many times. Just do something. Take action. A mentor can certainly help you do that. Nick, tell me a little bit about—if you’re comfortable sharing anything—what is your net owner benefit strategy? Do you just pay yourself a straight salary or some other stuff that the gym kicks in? Or how do you go about that?

Nick Beal (12:02):
Yeah, so I do kind of a monthly draw. I have a number that I like to make sure that I take out of the business, but really what I try to do is I maintain my account to a place where it holds a certain amount of cash just to always make sure the business has what it is. But from there, I just extract any profits out month to month, knowing that if I ever need to put money back in, it’s all from the same place anyway. So, it kind of—my thought is I keep a certain amount that I like to have in the account to handle business operations. And then, the rest I utilize to invest into other areas. I do run, as much as my account allows me to, through the business.

Nick Beal (12:42):
As I led into knowing I was going to be purchasing the building, I did change that strategy up some, obviously, because we wanted to show as much income as possible coming, or profit coming from the business, so that way I had as much buying power as possible. But now going out of like, “Hey, I won’t have any large purchases through the gym.” I’ll probably change that up a little bit to take care of the tax burden. But it’s really just a monthly draw. Keep it very simple.

Mike Warkentin (13:09):
Listeners, there are creative and legal ways to pay yourself. Talk to an accountant if you don’t know how to do it, and you don’t know what to do to tick all the boxes for the government and also minimize your tax burden. Do talk to someone about that so that you can find out how you can cover your bases and earn—keep—as much as you can. So, there’s lots of ways that gym owners do it. Some people pay themselves straight salaries. Other people have all sorts of webs of corporations and transfers and things like that. It all works, but if you don’t know how to do it, talk to someone who can help you with that. So Nick, the next thing I want to ask you is: How does a mentor help you with consistency and building that net owner benefit? Because again, when I was without a mentor, I would just do some stuff, do some stuff, and kind of randomly running around. I didn’t have someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, get back to this thing. You should maybe fix your on-ramp first before you start looking at Facebook ads.” That kind of stuff. How has a mentor helped you build this number over time?

Nick Beal (14:01):
Yeah, I think it’s just the accountability piece. Just like what we do for our athletes: They’re checking in. They aren’t—you’ll find moving along through this, there’s no revolutionary ideas. Beyond, you know, the first “aha!” moments that you have within your journey. But once you kind of figure that out, it’s just keeping the blinders on of like, “Hey, we’re focusing on this until our next meeting. We’re not focusing on these five things. Let’s focus it down to these actual things, so you can make an impact.” So, I think that’s where I find benefit out of utilizing a mentor is just the, “Oh, I’ve got to check in with my mentor. I don’t want to be the guy that didn’t do his homework.” I can’t say that I haven’t every now and again had that happen. But knowing that I have to have that meeting and that accountability, I find that very beneficial.

Mike Warkentin (14:49):
Who are you working with right now? Who’s your mentor?

Nick Beal (14:51):
Ryan McFadyen.

Mike Warkentin (14:53):
Ah.

Nick Beal (14:53):
Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (14:54):
He is a good one.

Nick Beal (14:55):
Yeah. He does a good job. He’s been—it’s been helpful. I mean, beyond the accountability, it’s also just—you know, being a gym owner can be lonely at times in regards to, like, our problems feel unique. However, there’s a lot of us out there, so just to be able to bounce around ideas and pain points, even things that were a great success that you want to share with them—sounds like you have a little bit of a therapist there.

Mike Warkentin (15:25):
That was just it, and that therapist also is going to give you some very interesting insight into “Do this thing right now.” And that’s the benefit, listeners. If you’re out there and you know that there’s something in your gym—you probably have a list of stuff; “I really know that I should do all this stuff,” but you don’t know where to start on that list—a mentor can look at the list and say, “This thing right here is going to give you the greatest return in your time and investment and move your business forward the furthest. You should do it right now, and I’m going to tell you to do it. And then I’m going to call you in a week to see if you did it. And I’m going to call you a week after that. And on our next call, if you didn’t do it, I’m going to really remind you to do it.”

Mike Warkentin (15:56):
And again, it sounds like hounding, but that’s what’s needed for a lot of people to move forward. There are other people who don’t need that hounding, and they just mow stuff down. I’ve talked to some gym owners who, they’re just like focused on a list. The mentor sets out the list, and these people just plow through the stuff and just checking boxes like maniacs. And it does incredible stuff for the business. Others require a little bit of prodding, and that’s cool too because it all gets done. So that’s—there’s different paths. We have different mentors. Some will be more abrupt with you, and some will be much more, I don’t know, empathetic. And I won’t use the word coddling, but they’ll certainly lead you along, give you what you need. But that’s the idea behind the whole process: finding out what needs to be done, then helping you find the way to do it. So, Nick, give me this. Gym owners who aren’t earning a lot from their gym yet: What’s a top piece of advice that you would give them? Just step one in getting more net owner benefit from their business?

Nick Beal (16:44):
I would say it’s get those systems in place. It has a compound effect. If you get the systems in place, and it just kind of—the wheels are turning without you having to do every little task yourself. And even if you’re at the point where you are doing all the systems yourself, it just allows you to have a process, so that way there’s a funnel to how everything is done. If you’re constantly reinventing the wheel each time that a new task comes in, and you’re doing something that’s the same over and over, but you’re doing it a different way each time, you only have so much time in the day. So, I found that having the systems and then kind of refining them along the way has helped for that exponential growth.

Mike Warkentin (17:19):
It makes a lot of sense because as sort of a hobby gym owner, as I was back in the 2013-14 range, I would just do it myself, or I would just say, “Eh, it takes too long to write this down. I’m just going to do it, whatever.” And it took me like five years of doing that to realize that if I just write down the process—and it’ll take 10 minutes—and hand it to someone, it gets done, and I can do something else, which is like sales, marketing, growing the business, improving the client experience, all those different things. What is a system that you would build first?

Nick Beal (17:47):
The system I think I would build first is: How are you developing your leads? You know, the lifeblood of your gym. Obviously, you need to have a great product. However, even if you have a great product, if no one’s showing up, it’s not going to be a very sustainable business model. So, find a way to get them in the door. And, not only that, how are you going to hold onto them as members? What’s that member lifecycle look like?

Mike Warkentin (18:16):
Intake and retention. Stuff that almost was never talked about a decade ago. It was just like, “Be a good coach, and they’ll show up.” It doesn’t work like that. You actually have to market, get people in the door, and then you have to work at retaining them, which is, you know, retention is actually sales over and over and over again. I’ll ask you a quick advice question off-topic. Where do you get your leads from? What’s your biggest source?

Nick Beal (18:34):
I mean, the majority of ours just literally come in through, “Hey, how’d you find us?” and they’re like, “Google.”

Mike Warkentin (18:39):
Okay, that’s cool. So, you got some SEO.

Nick Beal (18:41):
I know. Yeah. When I took over our gym, we were fifth in the SEO in our area, so we’d be like way down. We were below a gym that had been closed for two years. So, I was like, “Wow, this is, this is not good.” Because I mean, I know how I find a business. I Google it—if I know nothing about the industry. And it’s like, “Hey, are you number one or two? Which one has the better website?” You know, read a little bit about them, ask some questions. Because most people are coming in uneducated about what we do, so I plowed a lot of resources into making our SEO better. And so, really, we’re trying to make sure that we’re just the first thing that people see. And then that way, if we capture them and do our job right, even if we—they’ll show up and find out that we are still the best service available.

Mike Warkentin (19:28):
That’s just a little thing, guys. It’s like, “Okay, it’s not sexy to work on my website SEO,” but it has huge, huge downstream effects. If you can be Google Page 1 for your area with local SEO, right? Like, you’re not going to win fitness—Nike or whoever else will have that one locked down. But like, if someone searches for “Best Gym in Portland, Maine,” Casco Bay is probably going to come up or at least be on that page, I’m guessing. And you’ve done the work to do that. So again, that’s the un-sexy stuff, but it pays off big time. Tell me—similar question—you’ve got a gym owner who’s starting to get to that hundred-thousand-dollar net owner benefit range, starting to feel like the gym is stable and profitable: What tip would you give that gym owner to get to the next level? You talked about leveling up and getting that to the next tier. What could that person do?

Nick Beal (20:13):
I mean, I think once you get to the hundred thousand dollars, it hits the point of like, “Okay, now how do I take care of my other people?” And that’s kind of the phase that we also kicked into in the beginning of this mentorship process as well—you know, once you’ve taken care of yourself, how do you start taking care of your employees? And then that really is what propels you into that next phase is you start having some employees that are making a career out of this rather than just a job. And then their growth—if you have your system set up right—as they grow, it’s growing your business, and the pie’s growing for everybody. So that really, I think would be the next phase.

Mike Warkentin (20:50):
Yeah. And it’s really, it’s more important than people think with staff development because once you make a good income—you know, if you drive your income up way, way, way higher, and your staff is only making 25 grand, the staff aren’t, they won’t stay. And then you’re right back to you in that hamster wheel of like intaking new people, training them, and then they quit or get fired. And then you’ve got to keep going through that. You can’t actually build a business. Whereas I’ve talked to gym owners at your level: They have three or four great staff members. They’ll tell me their staff members are making 75, 80, you know, $90,000 a year with benefits, which is great. Those staff members are then incentivized to stay at the gym, stay at the business, build it, run it, and the owner can then start doing other stuff saying, “Oh, you know what? I want to invest in real estate. I want to open an Airbnb. I want to pursue crypto,” whatever it might be. But the owner then has that time and flexibility to do it. But it comes from building a great staff. I’ll ask you, as an associated question, what kind of staff do you have? Do you have a whole bunch of full-time people, part-time people, what have you got there?

Nick Beal (21:46):
Yeah, I have three full-time staff members. And then we utilize part-time coaches as well. But, um, the majority of our businesses run through our full-time staff in regards to operational day-to-day activities, and then they have a certain amount of class load that they handle as well. But I’ve found that as we’ve transitioned out into more full-time employees, the product has become better. And then, you know, just like we said before of like, “Hey, taking care of those people,” that reflects on the product and helps it grow.

Mike Warkentin (22:20):
Yeah. Do you have—is it three full-timers per location? Or three in total that are shared?

Nick Beal (22:24):
Yeah, three in total. So, we have two at our Portland location and one at our secondary location in Augusta.

Mike Warkentin (22:31):
How long have they been around? Do you happen to know off the top of your head how long these guys have been around?

Nick Beal (22:34):
How long have they been coaches?

Mike Warkentin (22:37):
Yeah, are they long-term?

Nick Beal (22:38):
So, I’ve had—my longest tenured coach has been with me for nine years.

Mike Warkentin (22:44):
Oh, good work.

Nick Beal (22:45):
Yeah. My second one has been there for—I want to say—six years. And then the other came with the purchase of the Augusta gym. She actually—I sat down with her and said I would only buy the gym if she stuck around.

Mike Warkentin (23:02):
Oh, she’s that good

Nick Beal (23:02):
So yeah, she’s been with me since 2019, so was that—four years now?

Mike Warkentin (23:08):
Okay. So that’s, yeah. So, you’ve got huge continuity with your most important people, which listeners, think about that. Like if your business—let’s say you, listener, stepped out of your gym and handed it off to a staff member, what would happen? What if that staff member was a nine-year staff member who was making a career, who wanted to be a part of that business and grow it and keep it strong? What would happen versus if you step back and that person was maybe just kind of not that interested in it because they’re not making any money and don’t really care? Things are difficult. So, staff retention is a huge one. Nick, what’s next for you? You’ve got your building. Are you in a situation here where you’re just going to kind of stabilize, get your stuff together and kind of move forward? Or do you have any more plans on the horizon?

Nick Beal (23:48):
Gym related or just in life?

Mike Warkentin (23:50):
Whatever, everything. Because once you get to that level, I mean, things start to change. Where I talk to gym owners, they’re like, “Oh, you know what? I’m buying an Airbnb in Fiji,” or something like that. So, what’s kind of—what’s the next step for you as an entrepreneur? We’ll call it.

Nick Beal (24:02):
So, I have actually been, along the way, been dabbling in real estate for a while now. And so, the gym purchase kind of came along with that. So, we actually manage quite a few properties, and now the next immediate phase is, I’ll actually be GCing the work within the building that we purchased. So, I will be doing a build-out of four residential units that sit above a CrossFit gym. So, updating those, getting the building repositioned so that it’s cash flowing. And then after that, I think I was going to sit back and kind of see which direction I want to take it in. Do I want to purchase another gym? Do I want to go all in on real estate? I really am in that kind of a—every now and again, you hit those points in your journeys when you get a little comfortable—and I think now it’s like, “All right, I need to put a little bit more stress on my plate to propel me forward.” So.

Mike Warkentin (24:56):
Doing general contracting for residential units will definitely put that stress on your plate for a bit.

Nick Beal (25:01):
I think it’s fun. You know, it’s use your hands, get a little dirty, and make something out of—it’s pretty rough right now, so it’s going to be a fun little project.

Mike Warkentin (25:14):
Good for you. I’ve got to ask this question: How do you deal with noise with residential units above a CrossFit gym? That’s a—I’ve got to know.

Nick Beal (25:21):
Yeah, so fortunately how it’s set up right now, it’s kind of built in a way that there’s a buffer between the two anyway. So, I’m going to be very tactful in regards to how I put insulation in above gym space, how I put flooring down on the residential space and maybe putting some restrictions on the music during certain hours, but luckily, I guess if I’m controlling the business that’s below the residential, I can have a little bit more say over that, but we’ll make it work out.

Mike Warkentin (25:55):
Yeah. It’s interesting because Chris Cooper and I worked on an article way back in the day about a gym, I believe it was Manhattan, where they had—the gym was on the main floor, and there were condos above, and they weren’t owned by the same person. Things got a little weird. So, I was super curious about that. So yeah, you can definitely kind of make that work. But again, that’s kind of the forward-thinking stuff that gym owners can do now based on the mistakes the rest of us made in the past.

Nick Beal (26:18):
Yeah, right. It’ll be challenging, and obviously, when you’re renting them out, you’re going to disclose that, you know, “Hey, you’re living above a gym,” and it is what it is.

Mike Warkentin (26:28):
Yep. That’s cool. Well, Nick, thank you so much for sharing all this. The lesson to take from this, listeners, is steady progress: Do something every day to grow your business, keep doing it, make sure it’s going the way you want it to, and then slowly move forward and pursue other stuff. Nick, thanks so much for being here and sharing that with us.

Nick Beal (26:44):
Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun.

Mike Warkentin (26:46):
That was Nick Beal. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” This is where the world’s best gym owners tell you exactly what they’re doing, so that you can have the same success. Subscribe on the way out. Do yourself a favor. We’re going to share more tips and help you move your business forward every single week. And here’s a final message from Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (27:02):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper, with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you, have already joined in the group. We share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.

The post The Un-Sexy (but Totally Effective) Way to Build Wealth as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Un-Sexy Stuff: The Key to Income as a Gym Owner

I’d love to tell you I have some magic trick that will make you a millionaire.

But the truth is that we create millionaire gym owners without tricks, gimmicks and magic.

We do it with systems, consistency and focus.

I know, that isn’t very sexy.

But this stat is: On average, gym owners who work with us reach $100,000 in annual earnings in about two years, regardless of starting point.

Here’s another sexy one: On average, gym owners who enter our Tinker Program reach millionaire status in just under two years.

Think about this: Wherever your business is right now, you could be a millionaire in about four years if you focus on the right things.

How do I know all this? We track data relentlessly. These are hard numbers.

And I’ll give you some more. Here are the net owner benefit (NOB or total earnings) scores for Two-Brain clients in November 2023:

Quotes From Top Earners

We interviewed the gym owners behind these numbers and asked for their secrets. The answers confirm what I said above: Huge incomes are supported by systems, consistency and focus.

“To be honest (we did) nothing out of the ordinary. … When we signed up with Two-Brain, it just threw gas on the fire.”

“We do the unsexy stuff consistently—it just pays off by compounding.”

“Honestly, it’s nothing specifically. It’s just knowing your skills. I run the numbers side—sales, marketing, growth, etc. My wife looks after the staff really well—we have a phenomenal staff of 14. We made two key hires that directly resulted in growth! Our efforts seem to just compound every year.”

“We doubled down on our skill sets. I run the marketing and getting people in, and my partner runs the coach development and the operations, so together we’re just a driving force!”

“It’s just taking Two-Brain’s material and running with it! There is nothing to it. The simple stuff works when it’s done consistently well!”

“We just do the simple things extremely well. Clients want a simple approach and service. We prescribe that and get great results.”

“We just follow the Two-Brain curriculum.”

Build a Foundation for Growth

I get distracted as an entrepreneur—and I’m not alone. So I was inspired to see our top earners supply “boring” answers when we asked how they earned so much from their gyms.

For me, it’s reassuring to know that if I do the right things consistently and stay focused, my business will grow.

So what are the right things? Chasing “once-in-a-lifetime marketing tactics” isn’t on the list, and you can probably pinpoint some places where distractions are hurting your business. But it can be tough to determine the exact best point of focus right now. That’s where a mentor comes in.

If you want to get a head start on gym growth in 2024, book a call here.

The post Un-Sexy Stuff: The Key to Income as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

CEO Distraction: Why You Aren’t Earning More From Your Gym

It’s easier to start something new than to grow what you have.

Ever been tempted to start a coffee shop, bike store or real-estate business? I have.

But what if you didn’t open a second business with a steep learning curve and just focused on your current business? You’d make fewer mistakes and build wealth faster.

Distraction is a killer for entrepreneurs.

Why do most gym owners fail to make $100,000 per year or achieve $1 million net worth?

Why are they burned out, overwhelmed and ready to quit way too early?

Distraction.

They just can’t focus on what’s most important right now and do the required work. Instead, they chase rabbits down holes.

Here’s an example: It’s cool and sexy to start a podcast and funnel clips onto TikTok. Lots of gym owners do that. But will a few Instagram likes grow your business? Or would you be better off doing the unsexy work of making sure every new client has a Goal Review Session booked on intake for Day 90 of membership? The answer is obvious.

Distraction hurts me, too. I have lots of ideas, and I get lots of pitches. I feel an urgent need to act on ideas, and in my early days as a gym owner, I pursued everything. For example, my gym needed more members at one point. Instead of solving that problem with focused action, I built an entire concussion-testing protocol. And when I was done, my gym still needed more members.

I’ve started, killed and occasionally sold many companies. But every single one of these diversions, even the successful ones, slowed the growth of my gym.

Focus and Growth

Tough love: You can only grow one company at a time.

You can own more than one, but you can only be CEO to one at a time. CEO is your job; if you’re not doing the right CEO work, your company won’t grow. And distracted CEOs kill companies.

Why do gym owners open a second location before the first gym is paying them $100,000 per year? Because they don’t know how to build and run a well-oiled machine that pays them $100,000, so they try to run two clunky engines that kick out $30,000 per year each.

We choose novelty over routine, even when routine is far more effective. We chase the “easy-hard work” of starting over instead of the “hard-hard work” of staying focused and growing our core thing.

You’re never going to run out of ideas, and the distractions will never stop coming.

So how do you lock onto your lighthouse and stay focused on a single point? With help.

I use a mentor to ensure I don’t chase distractions while my business crumbles—and I have a lot of distractions that try to pull me away from the tasks that will grow my business.

If you can’t stay focused on critical tasks, or if you can’t figure out what those tasks are, a mentor can help. A mentor can determine exactly what’s holding your business back and give you an exact plan to make improvements fast. And you’ll get the accountability you need to stay on track.

Want to find focus and earn more from your business in 2024? Book a call with my team here.

The post CEO Distraction: Why You Aren’t Earning More From Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Our Top 10 Earners Have 1 Simple Tip for You

Chris Cooper (00:02):
If you’re not getting your client’s results, you’re not a good coach. And if your business isn’t getting you results, it’s not a good business. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is our monthly leaderboard show when I talk about some of the top performers in Two-Brain, tell you exactly what they’re doing, and then I interview them to tell you how they did it. This month we’re looking at net owner benefit. That is the income that these leaders take from their gym every month. In other words, it’s the money that their gym provides to them and their families in the form of dividends or salaries or whatever that is—benefits—so that they can keep their family growing, but more importantly, keep their gym alive too. Look, if your gym isn’t profitable, it’s not sustainable, and if it’s not sustainable, you can’t get clients results that will last them the rest of their life.

Chris Cooper (00:50):
Today I want to feature the top 10 net owner benefit recipients in Two-Brain from last month. And then I’m going to tell you how they did it. Now, I was kind of surprised, to be honest, with the answers that these people gave, but I’m going to share all of them with you in a moment. First, let’s go through the top 10. Net owner benefit is the sum of the income that you make from your gym. You could take that income as a salary; you could take it as benefits. You could take it as in-kind payments, like your gym pays for your cell phone if you want to, or maybe your gym pays for the vehicle, whatever. This is the benefit that you receive from the gym. Every month we track these from the 930 gyms currently in Two-Brain, and we see who’s doing the best.

Chris Cooper (01:27):
We ask them, “How are you doing that well?” And then we share it with you for free. All of these numbers are in U.S. dollars. We convert them automatically so that we know that we’re comparing apples to apples. And I’m going to start with 10th place last month: The 10th place gym comes from the States, and last month they did $15,136.02. That’s take-home; that’s not top-line gross revenue. That’s what the owner took home from the gym. In ninth place—slightly better—$15,403.33. Congratulations. That’s an amazing income from a gym, and you deserve it. Next, in eighth place: $16,324.77. Now you can extrapolate this out over the year. Here’s another thing: When we’re looking at these numbers, we’re not looking for, like, a one-shot, one-hit-wonder. Maybe they didn’t get paid all year, and they took it all in one month.

Chris Cooper (02:19):
We don’t do that. We look at a rolling-three average. So, this is a sustainable, consistent income that these gym owners are making from their gyms that they deserve because they’re serving humanity in the greatest possible way. In seventh place: $16,622.67. Amazing. But we’re still going up. Now, let’s just pause for a second here. Imagine—I don’t know what you make right now—but imagine that you took home $16,622.67 last month from your gym. What would that mean to your family? Does that mean that your spouse can quit their job and work with you in the gym or just be more present for your kids’ activities? Does that mean that your kids are not going to have to worry about college or that you’re not going to have to worry about “How can I retire from this?” Those problems become solvable. Money solves money problems, and the first step in making a gym that changes your town is making a gym that’s sustainable enough to stick around long enough to change your town.

Chris Cooper (03:18):
And that means you have to be profitable. In sixth place: $17,933.33 take-home net owner benefit last month. Amazing. In fifth place, though, narrowly beating that: $18,000 exactly. So obviously this gym owner is setting themselves up on a recurring payment schedule of $18,000 per month. Now look, if you want to make progress with your net owner benefit, and I’m going to share some of their tips later on, but I’ll share my tip, the fastest way to do that is just to plan out raises in advance. Because you know what happens if you’re just running your business out of your checking account? You go out and you buy the coffee, and you go out and you buy this thing and that thing, and eventually it just drains your account. Right? There’s no plan to it. We follow a strategy in Two-Brain called Pay Yourself First, where we have people plot out how much they want to be paid and then work backward to figure out how much revenue they need, how many clients they need, and what those clients should be paying.

Chris Cooper (04:14):
And then they use those numbers to make decisions about expenses and expansion and team and hires and all that other stuff too. When you start with that, that creates the opportunity to actually earn more money. If you don’t start with that and you just take what’s left over out of the account at the end of the month, you’re going to earn very little—and sometimes zero. So, in fourth place, last month for net owner benefit in Two-Brain: $21,063. Incredible. Congratulations. You deserve it. In third place: $21,566. Amazing. Now every gym in the top 10, from tenth place to second place, came from the USA. Congratulations. The top two did not. The top two—and I’m going to report U.S. dollars here—but the top two were from outside the States. And that’s amazing for net owner benefit because it shows both the viability and the strength of Two-Brain gyms worldwide.

Chris Cooper (05:08):
The second-place gym in the world for net owner benefit last month came from Canada. Woo, go Canada, go. This is in U.S. dollars, though: $24,061—they took home last month. And again, this is not a one-time, one-hit-wonder. This is their average over the last three months. It’s recurring. Finally, the top NOB, net owner benefit, winner from last month came from the U.K., and they took home $25,771.68 U.S. Congratulations to everybody. Congratulations to everybody who’s winning the net owner benefit challenge. Congratulations to the people who are nowhere near this leaderboard, but are inspired by the winners and are ready to learn what the winners do so that they can keep their gym vibrant and strong and create opportunities for their staff and change their clients’ lives. Let’s talk about, now, how they did it. So, I’m not going to read these in any particular order because I don’t want to give away who the winners are, but the answers were both consistent and still a little bit surprising to me. When we went out and we interviewed all these winners, we said, like, “What did you do differently?”

Chris Cooper (06:15):
And the big shock to me was, “We didn’t really do anything different, but we’re very, very good at the basics.” And so, if you take away nothing from the rest of this podcast episode, I want you to remember that: It’s more important to do the basics consistently well than it is to try the new thing. If you’re looking for some novel new secret among these top 10 net owner benefit winners in the world, you’re not going to find it. And that was a big surprise to me. I was looking for somebody to say, “Oh, we’re doing this brand new thing on Instagram, TikTok,” whatever. Every single one of these people said, “We’re really, really good at following the Two-Brain prescription. We do what our mentor tells us. We do it again, and we do it again and again and again, and we look at our metrics, and when we know something is working, we go all in on that, and we repeat it to death.”

Chris Cooper (07:01):
So, I hope that doesn’t bore anybody. I think these answers are still really amazing to hear. Let’s get into them. The first respondent said, “It’s been a steady climb to this point, so it is expected that we would make this much money,” which means they understand their metrics. We want you, the gym owner, to understand your metrics, and they can actually use those metrics to forecast into the future, right? We said, “What did you do differently to reach this number?” And he said, “To be honest, nothing out of the ordinary. We’ve owned our first location since 2014, and we were in a pretty good place when we started Two-Brain, but that threw gas on the fire, and we’ve just grown since.” “Okay, what did you do that other gyms might not have done?” He says, “We did the un-sexy stuff consistently, and it pays off by compounding.”

Chris Cooper (07:45):
He said, “My email list, now, we’ve built it up to 7,000 people, so if we do a 5130 post, it has that much greater effect.” And it’s the same thing. You know, he repeats the stuff that he did in the RampUp program at Two-Brain, but he does it again, and every time it gets better; the results get better. It compounds, and he can just keep doing this forever. He says, “On Tuesday, I bought my building.” Hey congrats. And he said, “That might impact my NOB as I pay more rent to myself, but I bought the building for about $400,000, and it was undervalued too.” So not only is this person’s net owner benefit going up—their income—but by investing the extra income now they’re starting to build wealth and moving into the Tinker Phase. So, congratulations, I’m so proud to share these stories.

Chris Cooper (08:29):
I’m so proud of these gym owners and every gym owner who’s successful, whether they do it with Two-Brain or not. The next says, “It’s really a matter of knowing your skills.” So, he says, “I run the numbers side: I look at sales; I look at marketing; I look at growth while my wife looks after our staff really well.” So, the partnership that they have really compounds and grows them better. And he says, “We have a phenomenal staff of 14. We have two key hires that directly compounded in growth, and our efforts just compound every year. Now, this person has been in Two-Brain for eight years, and they just keep growing. And yes, he does do a great job of learning the new stuff because we do add new curriculum every single year. But what he is amazing at is knowing what he is amazing at and doing those things over and over and over again.

Chris Cooper (09:16):
Okay, so he says he follows the Two-Brain curriculum. Sometimes he’ll look outside for inspiration or energy or new ideas, but the bottom line is that they keep growing every single year. He’s been with Two-Brain since the beginning, and they just keep growing because their mentor reminds them to keep doing the basics consistently well. This next one was also a little bit of an echo of the one that I just read. He said, “We double down on our skill sets. I run the marketing and getting people in, and my partner runs the coach development and the operations. So together we’re just a driving force.” This has been a recurring theme. Honestly, I have never worked well with a partner, but a complimentary skillset can only help you. So, if you are great at metrics, ops, understanding how to make decisions, reading a P&L, and they’re great at working with people, that is a really amazing compounding effect.

Chris Cooper (10:07):
And those are actually like the two brains of your business, right? The personal skills and the business skills. And so, when this—when we asked this person like, “What did you do differently to be successful?” He said, “Nothing. It’s just taking Two-Brain’s material and running with it. The simple stuff works when it’s done consistently well.” I love it. Congratulations. And this, I think, was more of a surprise to me than it should have been. And so far, the three interviews that I’ve read you have all said the exact same thing. We do Two-Brain’s material. We avoid distractions. We stay focused. We do it over and over and over again, and that’s what gives us compounding results. Should I have been surprised? No. But I was surprised that, so far, not one has said, “We did something different.” Next, this gentleman says that their net owner benefit was expected and planned.

Chris Cooper (10:55):
He said, “We don’t do anything different. We do the simple things extremely well. Clients want a simple approach and service. We prescribe a simple approach and service, and we get great results.” He said, “We designed our own accounting system,” which is amazing. Congratulations. The key here though is that they understand their metrics that will grow the business, and they’re getting their clients great results. Again, Two-Brain Business, and they are crushing it. So proud of you. Alright, next, the last interview that we had was, “Hey, this is normal for us. It was expected and predicted. We do this kind of every month, and we’re just slowly growing.” And we said, “What do you do differently?” And he said, “Literally nothing. We just follow the Two-Brain curriculum.” Now, if you’re watching this video and you see me looking down, it’s because I’m reading the transcripts of their interviews verbatim.

Chris Cooper (11:41):
This is exactly what they said, and they said it over and over. Of the five people on our top 10 who we interviewed, every single one said, “We just followed the Two-Brain curriculum. We kept it simple. We know what we’re good at, and we just keep repeating that and repeating it and repeating that.” And so, look, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. As a mentor, I can tell you one of the best things that I can do when I’m focused on getting a client good results is figuring out what they’re great at and then reminding them to do it over and over and over again. Mentorship is not about teaching. Teaching is all about novelty. It’s all about bringing something new into the equation. And while mentors can be great teachers—if you don’t know how to do something, they’ll teach you step by step—a lot of our job is actually accountability.

Chris Cooper (12:30):
“You have to do this thing. You have to do this thing again. You have to do it a third time. You have to do it more.” Showing you how to look at your numbers is really important. Like you need to develop these skills so that you can run a great business for 30 years. You’re not going to be with your mentor for 30 years. We want you to have the skills to keep building forever. But the key is that, for a lot of us, having a mentor who just holds us accountable and says, “Keep doing the common stuff over and over and getting better and better and better,” that has a better compounding effect than any other investment we make. I have mentors who do that for me. And frankly, if she wasn’t doing it, I wouldn’t be tracking my metrics.

Chris Cooper (13:10):
I wouldn’t be doubling down on the stuff that isn’t new, and it’s not maybe as exciting as trying out Instagram reels or whatever. So, that’s the key folks. I know that when we’re talking net owner benefit, there are some critics out there who say, “Oh, they shouldn’t be talking about profits so much.” But every gym owner who has had to look carefully at their grocery bill every month, they know that money is the only thing that solves the money problems. And once you solve the money problems in your business and the money problems in your life, you can get onto working on the bigger, more important issues too. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Congratulations to all of our top NOB earners. You’re not just doing it for yourself. You’re an inspiration to everybody else.

The post Our Top 10 Earners Have 1 Simple Tip for You appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Top Gym Owners Made This Much in November 2023

What does your gym business pay you to be CEO?

It’s an important question because, as a gym owner, you’ve stopped being a coach and started being a CEO—whether you know it or not. As owner, you must acquire different skills, you’ll wear different hats, and you’ll be paid differently.

The success of your gym isn’t measured by how many members you have. It’s determined by what your gym pays you as CEO.

The kicker? You can make $100,000 or more with just 50 members if you want to. But if you have 500 members and you’re not earning anything from your gym, you’ll close.

Gym owners pay themselves in various ways. Some take salaries, some take profit distributions and some charge their gym rent as a landlord. To avoid overtaxation, some have their businesses pay their bills (like their cell phone or their car loan). Some do all of the above.

Net owner benefit (NOB) is the total of salary, profit and the “extras” your gym provides for you.

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

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

Total: $100,000 NOB (or $8,500 per month)

Here are the top gym owners worldwide for NOB in November 2023 (we publish the names for our clients but not publicly):

How did they do it?

They did the “unsexy things” consistently instead of chasing unicorns. For example, they built and maintained solid day-to-day systems for their gyms instead of obsessing over the next get-rich-quick marketing tactic.They paid themselves first and planned raises for themselves in advance. Using strategies like Profit First, they wrote their paychecks before they did anything else. (Listen: “Why Your Gym Must Pay You First and How to Make It Happen.”)They increased gross revenue by increasing their client count, keeping clients longer and earning more per client.They maximized ROI on their expenses (instead of cutting expenses).They maximized their value to the business by focusing on high-value roles.

In the simplest terms, they measured what the business paid them, and they figured out where their money was coming from, where their money was going and how they were spending their time. Then they worked relentlessly to improve their businesses and become better CEOs.

You can do the same thing and earn more from your business. If you want to do it fast and reach $100,000 NOB in about two years’ time (our clients’ average, regardless of starting point), book a call with my team here.

The post Top Gym Owners Made This Much in November 2023 appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Building Your Dream Lifestyle (It’s Harder Than You Think)

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Hey, I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today, we’re talking about what happens when, as an entrepreneur, you build a team, you’re a little bit successful, maybe you’ve even got some profit, but you still get distracted all the time. You’re still looking at your phone all night; you can’t stop thinking about your business. With me today is Ashley Haun from The Traveling Bee Business and Lifestyle Mentoring. Welcome, Ashley.

Ashley Haun (00:26):
Thank you.

Chris Cooper (00:27):
And we’re going to talk about transferring to success, like evolving as an entrepreneur to the point where you actually create a lifestyle that you want when it might actually be more challenging to do so than people think. So, Ashley, let’s start with this. A lot of people think like, “Oh, when I’m successful, I’m just going to live on the beach all day, and I’m going to drink rum drinks, and then I’m going to get in my Lambo, and I’m going to—” Like, they think that they’re going to be Magnum P.I., right?

Ashley Haun (00:55):
Yeah.

Chris Cooper (00:56):
Why isn’t that the case with most entrepreneurs once they reach a little bit of success?

Ashley Haun (01:01):
That’s such a good question, and one that is really important to answer because I think as we become more and more successful, it’s easier to get further and further away from it. And so, asking this question in the beginning of your entrepreneurship journey and as your business scales and really defining what lifestyle means to you—because this is an individual answer—is super important.

Chris Cooper (01:30):
So, if we start with that—so, you know, at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, I mean, I was just like, “Please God, let me pay the rent this month.” Right? How do you start thinking about, like what I eventually want out of a lifestyle?

Ashley Haun (01:45):
You have to be very intentional with it. It can’t—it’s never going to happen if you just haphazardly plan for it, or you don’t take time and intention with defining your own personal lifestyle. So, you know, this is a great time of year. We’re at the end of a year, and we’re planning our businesses for 2024. Are we planning our lifestyle, and are we defining it and putting it into your calendar along with those business goals that you want to reach to?

Chris Cooper (02:21):
That’s interesting because, you know, when I started my gym, I was like, “Well, I’m living my dream. My dream is to open a gym, and now here I am, like perfect day, every day.” But then you quickly realize that owning the gym or being an entrepreneur comes at the expense of other things. So, you know, one thing that I want to start with is really talking about the notion of a balanced lifestyle or work-life balance. Do those things even exist?

Ashley Haun (02:49):
That’s tough. I don’t think they exist. I think that life is in seasons and segments, and it’s impossible to balance it all in any particular season or segment because some are going to require more of you in your business—if staff changes, you know, you lose clients, whatever may be going on—and that requires you to get back into your gym or— And so, that’s going to feel a little out of balance, right? You’re not going to be able to do the lifestyle things that you’ve picked out for yourself. Then things are going to—you’re going to work on it—they’re going to pick back up. You’re going to start achieving those goals again, and you’re going to be able to do some more lifestyle stuff that you had set out in the beginning of the year. So, there is no, there’s no balance to any of it. It’s, I think, more an awareness is what’s important than trying to balance it all. Like, “Hey, you know what? I recognize that I am deep in my business right now, but that’s not my goal.” Or, “Hey, I recognize I am enjoying the heck out of this lifestyle I’ve created because of my business.” And that’s what’s really important, not trying to balance all of it.

Chris Cooper (04:02):
What do you mean specifically by seasons and segments?

Ashley Haun (04:06):
Yeah, so this is—seasons are longer periods of time, right? Three months, four months, whatever. Like we traditionally think of it as fall, winter, spring. Segments are moments that are shorter. And so those can last a couple of weeks or a week, right? I’ve been sick this week, and so that’s not my whole life. That’s not even a season. That’s a segment in this week. And how am I going about doing all the other things that I normally do in this small segment of life?

Chris Cooper (04:38):
What season of life would you say that you’re in right now?

Ashley Haun (04:41):
Oh, I am in a season in which I am learning how to articulate, how to help others really get the lifestyle they wanted or they want, because I did this thing, like I have a lifestyle that I love, and it keeps expanding and growing, and my businesses keep expanding and growing. And it’s not by chance that any of this happened. I didn’t realize when I was doing it how intentional I was being with it. And so, now I’m in this phase of figuring out how I did it, so I can help others duplicate what I’ve done. The biggest piece of the puzzle that I figured out so far is the planning part of it: how important planning is to making all of this happen. So yeah, that’s where I’m at.

Chris Cooper (05:31):
That’s interesting. And I want to dig into that because a lot of people associate their dream lifestyle with this carefree, “I don’t need to plan. I wake up when I’m ready, and I sleep when I’m tired, I exercise whatever,” and we’re going to come back to that. But first, let’s talk about what we mean by lifestyle because not everybody’s kind of perfect day is the same, right?

Ashley Haun (05:52):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think there’s a big misconstruction with thinking lifestyle is just more vacations. Lifestyle is not more vacations. It can be. I mean, I’m the first to admit we go on some great vacations, but that’s not my lifestyle because I want my lifestyle to be my day in and day out, not just, you know, a week that I got away from everything. So, when thinking about designing and planning your lifestyle, it really should start with the moment you wake up and how your entire day looks after that.

Chris Cooper (06:29):
Can you walk us through how you formulate that plan?

Ashley Haun (06:31):
Yeah. So, for me personally, I plan every single week with a lot of intention. And I was lucky enough to see Todd Herman speak in 2020, and this is one of the things that I walked away the most with—and this comes from him—is that Sunday there’s about an hour spent looking at what this week is going to look like. And so, I use a planner. I’m a write-it-down, pen-and-paper person. And so, I plan everything out from my own personal fitness to the meals that my family’s going to eat, the meetings, the dates with my wife. Like all of it goes in this planner. So, then it’s very intentional with not just—I don’t know, you know, I only get December 1st, 2023 one time, and I want to make the most of it.

Chris Cooper (07:21):
Yeah. It’s funny. That’s of course today’s date. And I’m like, why’d you pick that weird date? You know? So, that’s interesting. Like, can you walk us through what kind of the perfect day in your life looks like? Or even just a typical day?

Ashley Haun (07:34):
Yeah. So, you know, years ago, Coop, you asked me this question, and it was really hard for me to answer this because we open gyms: A lot of times we see a problem that needs to be solved, right? We want to make other people healthy; we want to make them as happy as we are. And we get lost in the sauce of what that actually really turns out looking like. And so, a lot of people think when they’re planning their perfect day, it has to be a perfect workday. And I don’t think that answers the full question. So, for me, I plan perfect workdays and also perfect off-days because I want to be very intentional, when being off, with my time and who I’m paying attention to and giving myself to. So, I have two of them. Perfect workday for me:

Ashley Haun (08:24):
You know, I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not a 4 or 5 a.m. riser. And I think that’s OK. There’s all kinds of different ways of getting a lot of stuff done in life. And so, I’m a perfect, you know, 6:30/7 a.m. riser. I spend the first two hours of my day doing the things I want to do, which is, you know, sometimes we label that as selfish, but it’s not. If I’m not optimized, then nothing is going to go right. I’m the biggest asset to any of my businesses, and the biggest asset to my kids is their mother. And so, the first two hours is about me and what I like. Then I go to work after that and speak to my clients and have meetings at my gym and all that good stuff. Fitness is in the afternoon, and then evenings are spent at home. My off days are very off, and I do my best to not be attached to Slack and all those forms of communication. And—but that’s just as important as things too.

Chris Cooper (09:25):
So, you have to map out each one. And what was the process of mapping this out? Did you just sit down and think, like, “What would my perfect day be?” Or did you have to do some reps of trying different things to figure it out?

Ashley Haun (09:39):
It’s definitely trial and error. Right? Each family, each relationship, each person is different. And it’s trial and error of what works best for you and the people and the businesses that are surrounding you. So, there’s no one great answer. I think the best thing to do is revisit it often. You can’t know what you want without knowing what you don’t want. Right? I tried the 5 a.m. life: I didn’t love it, and that’s OK. Right? So, trial and error for sure.

Chris Cooper (10:11):
When you’re figuring this out, like how much does your partner figure into the process? Like, are you saying, “Hey, Kara, let’s design our perfect day together”? Or is it more like, “Well, this is what I want it to be,” and then they have like their own perfect day, and you guys try to integrate it together, or are you just ships in the night, or how’s that work? How do you tie it into the family?

Ashley Haun (10:33):
Yeah, so being an entrepreneur, right? And then having someone in your life who’s not an entrepreneur, that’s very typical and hard waters to navigate. And we were terrible at it in the beginning because I would have these, you know, big dreams and things like that. And fair enough, like she’s a firefighter, so it’s put water on the fire, right? Like, that’s the job. And so, it was allowing each other to have, again, a season or a segment in which maybe the one pulled on each other’s perfect day a little bit more. And communicating that. So, we recognize we own the gym together. We recognize, “Well, Ash’s got to dive back into the gym a little bit more right now.” Or “Ash really wants to build The Traveling Bee and do more with that. And so, there’s not going to be so much of her available for other parts of life, but that’s not forever.” And we also recognize what each other’s end goals are, and that’s the common denominator between everything. So, really coming together on, “Hey, you know, our three-year, five-year plan is to retire in Costa Rica. And when we do that, everything that we’re doing is working towards that one end goal. Our Tuesday might have to look a little different than we want because of that end goal, but that’s OK too.”

Chris Cooper (12:02):
How do you start that conversation with your spouse?

Ashley Haun (12:05):
You have to recognize the differences in each other and how each other operates, and then have an openness to change. Not everything is—I mean, it’s a partnership, it’s not a one-way street. And it’s a lot of—it’s a lot of talking, a lot of talking and a lot of being open knowing that the other person has your best interest at heart.

Chris Cooper (12:30):
OK. So that’s how you define your perfect day. What are some of the other obstacles that entrepreneurs face? I know like, I got this really bad habit of: Things are going well? Just dig into my business a little bit and wreck something, you know, swing a sledgehammer, break it—because then I can fix it, and I can feel really important because I’m the only one who can fix it. Right? Like, what are the obstacles that entrepreneurs go through? Why aren’t they living their perfect day all the time?

Ashley Haun (12:56):
I think it’s—there’s different ones at different parts of the entrepreneurial journey, and I can just speak for myself, but I’ve heard this from other ones too. In the beginning, when you reach a little bit of success, you’re afraid to share it. “So, hey, you know what? I’ve been working, and I saved up, and I earned this Hawaii vacation, and I’m going to be gone for two weeks.” And they’re afraid to share it with their team, with their members. They’re, you know, they hide, and they’ll say, like, “Oh yeah, I’m just going to be gone, but I’m going to work the entire time. Don’t worry about it.” Right. That’s an obstacle for sure. I think some of the other obstacles are, like we talked about, not being purposeful and not planning. The more we scale, the larger we grow, it’s harder to get back to that perfect day because we’ve been so far removed from it that we’re just not recognizable in anything that we want to be doing.

Chris Cooper (13:53):
Where do you think this guilt comes from? I didn’t think of it until you said it, but I can totally resonate with that. Like, you’re checking in with your staff five times while you’re on vacation because you want them to know you’re not having any fun. Right? You feel guilty about it. Where’s that from? Yeah.

Ashley Haun (14:08):
I think it comes from assuming. You are assuming that they’re upset that you’re gone, and, you know, you are not working and they’re working. Or you’re assuming that maybe your members are upset with you because you’ve gone on this amazing vacation. I think that’s the first place where you have to stop. Then the second place is you have a conversation. You know, I used to say my greatest joy was teaching someone how to do their first pull-up, like helping them get the strength, and right? Like, that was amazing. My greatest joy now is—part of it is helping my staff live a life that’s abundant. And that is for them, if it’s a great vacation, then heck yeah. You know, for one of my staff members, it’s buying a motorcycle. Heck yeah. Like, how do I help you do that with the career that you’re having with me and my business?

Chris Cooper (15:00):
So, that’s interesting. And would you say that’s part of your dream lifestyle—helping them? Or are you helping them only because it’s part of their dream lifestyle?

Ashley Haun (15:09):
I hope it’s both. I hope that I’m building something that allows others to be abundantly happy in all the ways they want. I mean, that’s a little selfish, but I think that’s pretty cool to do in life, and that I want them walking around just that happy.

Chris Cooper (15:25):
That’s pretty cool. To be honest, Ashley, you’re the expert here, but if we asked any of the mentors on the Two-Brain team, “Why are you a mentor?” I think they’d give a very similar answer. It’s just part of their perfect day to be of service and feel like they’re helping other people. So, super cool. Well, let’s talk about some case studies here. So, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs, and you help them kind of achieve their dream lifestyle. What are some of the first things that you usually have to fix? And then I’m going to ask you for some stories or examples.

Ashley Haun (15:55):
Yeah, so the first thing we have to fix is that very beginning stages of: Let’s get you back just a little bit. Let’s remember just a little bit of why we started this thing. Like we decided probably we didn’t want to work for the man, but what did we want also in that? And let’s pull that from the vault in our brain, and then let’s really dream big because oftentimes the dreams are too small—it’s not, you know—and so I’m really always encouraging them to get bigger with what they want because I think there’s a sense of, you know, “Well, if I accomplish this thing, that’s good enough.” No. Like, you know, I had one of my mentees, he wanted to—he had started his pilot’s license, didn’t finish it, so the goal was to finish his pilot’s license. And I’m like, that’s cool. Because he wanted to be able to get to his kids faster who were farther away. And I’m like, “Well, what about buying the plane?” Right? Like, let’s really do the thing if we’re going to be able to get to our kids faster.

Chris Cooper (16:58):
Wow. OK. So, that’s one thing they have to do is like, set up a possibly a bigger dream or just even clarify the dream they have. I remember you telling me one time, like the first step that you don’t want to overlook is that the business has to be doing well for the owner to be able to take the time off they want, earn the money they want, et cetera, right?

Ashley Haun (17:19):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny though because you need to—you know, really step one is figuring out what you want. Step two then is reverse engineering the business to make sure it can support that.

Chris Cooper (17:30):
Yeah.

Ashley Haun (17:31):
Right. Because we can get stuck in like, “Yeah, the business is killing it, and I’m just still killing it over and over again, but what am I doing it for?” Right? So, it’s making sure that those go in order for sure.

Chris Cooper (17:43):
Yeah. I think that’s the thing a lot of us lose sight of is that we start the business and at first, like we exist in service of the business, but ideally, the point is that the business exists to serve us and build this lifestyle. OK. So, Ashley, can you give us a couple of examples here? No names or anything, just like, you know, here’s an example of a person who was feeling like this and then, they identified this was their ideal lifestyle, and here were the steps that we had to take to get there.

Ashley Haun (18:10):
Yeah. One that recently came up is that she wanted to go back to her home country for a couple of months during what is their traditional holiday season and so part of what we had to do—you know, that was the goal, right? And it’s a big one. Like she’s gone for about two to three months, may extend it, but we had to get the business to a point in which the staff could handle managing the business for that long without her actual presence. And so, what we did were some trial runs of, “OK, now I want you to go away for a week. Let’s see what holes are in the boat. They’re not allowed to talk to you. Let’s identify those when you get back, and let’s fix that.” And so, we trial and errored this situation, this business, until it was able to move without her being physically there for a couple months at a time.

Chris Cooper (19:06):
OK. So, that was the first step. And then I’m sure that there were still some lingering fears or emotional hurdles to overcome when it was time to actually get on the plane, right?

Ashley Haun (19:15):
Yeah. You know, we all, we set ourselves up—and I don’t think it’s necessarily my intention—but our business generally runs on us: our face, our demeanor, our— And when we leave that thing—I mean, it’s a baby of its own—there’s some fear that it’s not going to be OK without us. And so again, recognizing that that’s a thing and helping walk through, “Well how are you going to deal with that? How is your staff going to deal with that? How are your clients going to deal with that? And having some steps in place in order to feel better about that is what’s been important.

Chris Cooper (19:58):
OK. So, how do you get over that? Because honestly, I think a lot of gym owners, the first time they take a vacation—they’re down in Mexico or whatever—they’re looking at their phone like, “Oh, what’s going on at the gym?” And, you know, whoever they’re there with is getting angry. Like, “Come on, can’t you just shut it off? Can’t you shut your brain off? Just relax.” How do they get to that point?

Ashley Haun (20:20):
Practice.

Chris Cooper (20:21):
Practice.

Ashley Haun (20:22):
Underst— Practice. You have to allow the situations to happen, right? The things, the Slack messages, the whatnot. And give your team, give the moment, the ability to work through it. Not everything that happens needs an answer right away. So, practicing being slow to answering those messages, or you know, “Hey guys, I’m going to hop on every day between two and three o’clock and handle stuff. Let me know what you need then.” But practice is where it’s at.

Chris Cooper (20:58):
OK. That’s interesting. So, if somebody doesn’t have a lot of self-discipline about this, right? Asking for a friend. And they’ve always got their phone on them, and as soon as Slack buzzes—maybe it shows up on their watch, or it vibrates in their pocket or whatever—and they’re like, “Ugh, the team needs me. I’ve got to get this.” How do you start building resistance to that?

Ashley Haun (21:18):
It’s like anything else, right? When you—you know, if you have an addiction to something. Because it’s truly an addiction. There’s some studies that have been done. There’s a particular great podcast between Huberman, and he talks about the small dopamine hit we get every time we see one of those things or— And so, we want to remove that from it. So, you know, turn those notifications off. That’s the first step, right? Doesn’t buzz you, doesn’t alert your arm. Second step would be to, you know, “OK, I’ve done that; I feel good about that. Can I remove that app from my phone?” You know, technology is wonderful in the sense that everything can happen on my wrist these days, but does that take away from my overall lifestyle and the people who I’m wanting to experience that with?

Chris Cooper (22:04):
Cool. Who would you say of your clients has like kind of the coolest lifestyle, the dream lifestyle that a lot of other entrepreneurs would want?

Ashley Haun (22:11):
Oh my goodness. That’s a tough question. I’ve got some fun ones where—I’ve got some pilots who are, you know, completing dreams like that, traveling for a couple months at a time. One of my favorite all-time clients was able to adopt and leave her business for two months to go, and her business ran just fine, and she came home and brought a brand-new family member. So, I think that one probably will go down as my all-time. I don’t know if you can beat that, but yeah, I mean, just some really fun stuff that people are accomplishing. Because, you know, why are we doing what we’re doing if we’re not enjoying it too?

Chris Cooper (22:54):
OK. So, you know, to flip back to gym owners, what’s realistic here? I mean, a lot of our friends would say, “Oh, you’ve already got a dream lifestyle. You work in a gym. You wear sweatpants all day; you probably work out like four hours a day. You know, you probably love it when nobody’s there, so you can go flex in the mirror.” Everybody listening to this podcast knows, like, I’m being sarcastic, but how far could a gym owner go? Like, what can a gym provide for you as far as lifestyle?

Ashley Haun (23:21):
Speaking from like personal total experience? I mean, it can do anything you want it to do, but you have to allow it to happen, and you also have to set out what it is you want. So, you know, for me, we take two giant vacations a year. I don’t work in my gym as far as, you know, coaching and things like that. But that’s what I personally wanted. It provides a great salary for me and my family to do everything that I want it to do. So, there is no limit on it. It’s the limits that you impose on what it can do for you. And if you choose to let it impose those limits, or you don’t believe those are limits, that’s cool too. Maybe that’s your lifestyle that you want. You want to be in your gym, you know, six hours a day and working out four, and flexing for an hour. That’s OK.

Chris Cooper (24:19):
… you want that.

Ashley Haun (24:21):
But I think it’s, you know, what is most important is don’t set a limit on it, and don’t judge other people for what they want out of their particular gym.

Chris Cooper (24:32):
So, that’s interesting because, you know, this week we’re talking about “Millionaire Gym Owner” the new book, and there are some people who are just repelled by the idea of even making money. But the point of the book is that what you’re really making is wealth. And one of the things that wealth creates for you is time freedom. Ashley, how long did you own your gym before just being in the gym every second of every day was no longer the dream?

Ashley Haun (24:55):
I would say I owned it for—before it was no longer the dream?

Chris Cooper (25:00):
Well, I mean, you still love owning your gym. I know. Just like I do. But you know, I kind of reached this point, maybe a couple years in where it’s like, “OK, I’m here 6 till 9, 6 a.m. until 9 p.m., you know, maybe Sundays off would be OK.” Something like that.

Ashley Haun (25:16):
Yeah. I was probably three years in where, you know, I recognized that my kids were saying things to me. I would pick them up after school; they would go to the gym after school every day. They would—and it was great. It’s a great way for kids to watch parents or anybody work out. They were in a great environment. They’re building forts in the backyard. They’re in the back of the gym; they’re skateboarding. Like, all of that is great. It was great until I realized that I was taking my kids through drive-thrus at nine o’clock at night because I didn’t have time to serve them dinner. And then I was like, “That’s enough.” This isn’t all that great for them because I, particularly, valued family dinner. And so, that’s when I was like, “We’ve got to make a change.”

Chris Cooper (26:02):
Is the family dinner in your perfect day lifestyle now?

Ashley Haun (26:05):
Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny: Our boys are older, so we do breakfasts and things like that because, you know, everybody’s a little crazy now. But yeah, that was a big—you know, I was taking them through, legit, I was taking them through Taco Bell at nine o’clock at night, and I was like, “What am I doing?” Yeah.

Chris Cooper (26:23):
It’s funny where that dark night of the soul hits you, right? Like, you just, “Lightning bolt, like, wait a minute. Uh, chalupas at nine?” So, Ashley, like, you and I have both been through this. We’ve been through dark spots in the gym, and there are people listening right now who are there, and they’re like, “Oh man, I work—I’m here at 6 a.m. I’m here at 6 p.m. My kids have to come to the gym way too often to just be fun anymore. Like, how do I get from there to the Ashley Haun lifestyle that I see on her Instagram?” Yeah. What are the steps?

Ashley Haun (26:56):
So, step one, talk to somebody who’s been through it, and has walked the walk. Really and truly, like the exact walk that you are walking, and be unafraid to listen to what they’re saying. Be inspired by that because that can buy you speed into getting out of that situation quicker than it took you or I to get out of it. Yeah.

Chris Cooper (27:23):
OK. OK. So, you talk to somebody, then what?

Ashley Haun (27:26):
Then you have to be diligent in taking the action that’s worked for them, really and truly. But here’s the, here’s where it’s—I’m going to go off a little bit different than what we typically say is: You have to take care of yourself too. So, take the action; do the steps. You know, I used to—and I think I made a mistake in saying this, if I’m being honest with you—the difference in success and failure is action. Yes, that’s true. But the action also includes taking care of you.

Chris Cooper (28:00):
Makes sense.

Ashley Haun (28:01):
And I never used to differentiate between that. I just thought it was like, “Do the steps, do the steps, do the steps.” But part of the steps are, “Am I OK?”

Chris Cooper (28:11):
OK. Well, I definitely want to dig into that a little bit more, but I can remember years ago—you know, I own a CrossFit gym. “Well, would you ever go to another gym to work out?”
Are you crazy? There’s no way. I would never even do that. Or think about it or talk about it.” And now, I see more and more gym owners doing that, like running their own gym and going to another gym to work out just to get that head space.

Ashley Haun (28:33):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, whatever it takes for you, there’s no judgment in it. Everybody is allowed to do the thing—within reason—that makes them function and be as great as they possibly can be for all the reasons that they set out to be.

Chris Cooper (28:53):
Yeah. I don’t think we should be feeling guilty about that. Like, at all. Like, we probably practice what we preach, and I think a lot of people are just scared, but they’re also scared of the effect that doing that would have if somebody saw that. Right. They’re afraid to get caught. So, let’s talk about that. You know, you talked early on about like: Entrepreneurs, they become successful, and they start to feel guilty, and they might want to disguise that, or they might want to hide it because the people around them might be suspicious, jealous, whatever that is Right? Might feel different. Like how do they handle that? Or how should they handle it?

Ashley Haun (29:25):
Yeah, they should handle it by: They have to be comfortable with it themselves. Right? So, you know, gosh, I actually thought back 10 years ago, “OK. You know, if I had a hundred members and I charged a hundred dollars a month, like I’m going to be killing it.”

Chris Cooper (29:41):
That’s $10,000.

Ashley Haun (29:43):
And then, you know, and that is, that’s a lot of money. And but, you know, I didn’t recognize all the other things that came along with it. Then I realized, well, yeah, and you know what? That’s exactly what my members are going to think: “Ashley’s killing it.” And I have to hide any of it. But I had to become comfortable with myself and how I would handle that situation with them before I could actually go out and handle it. So now, I had some of those interactions that were uncomfortable, you know, people are going to say things, and—but I am able to articulate, “Hey, you know what? Come along with me.” And that’s part of the reason that I want everybody in my life to live so abundantly because I want to show you the way. I’m not here to gatekeep any of this. I’m here to share with you how we can all live like this. And that’s a great way to approach the conversation.

Chris Cooper (30:38):
And that’s, you know, one thing that a lot of gym owners have to understand about wealth is you don’t become wealthy by taking from other people. Right. You’re not like having this lifestyle at their expense. Most of the wealthy people that you and I know got wealthy by making other people successful.

Ashley Haun (30:55):
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Cooper (30:57):
And so, that is kind of the key. How do you handle it when your dream lifestyle is maybe nowhere near the dream lifestyle of your partner or spouse or your family? You know, for example, maybe you want to fly, travel around the world, and they just want to stay at home on a rocking chair or vice versa?

Ashley Haun (31:13):
Yeah. That’s a good one because there has to be a common thread between you, and maybe it’s not today’s—or, you know what, I take that back. It could be that mine is to travel the world and, you know, someone else’s is to sit at home, and that’s the person you’re in a relationship with, so then your day to day becomes your common thread.

Chris Cooper (31:35):
OK.

Ashley Haun (31:36):
I think that’s—you know, because that’s how you’re going to find a common ground to walk together with. And you know, Kara and I, Kara’s and mine are very different. Like I love her to death, but her goal is to hang her 10 toes off of a surfboard. That is her ultimate life goal. Not mine, but it’s cool, right? And there’s zero judgment on my part. I think it’s a great goal, and it’s super hard, and I don’t know how to do it. And very few people do know how to do it. But, you know, our, it’s—my goals as far as business goes, and the number of people I want to help is different than what she’s trying to accomplish. But we also have a common thread of what we want to.

Chris Cooper (32:19):
But you can both surf, right? Like you do have that in common. Yeah.

Ashley Haun (32:22):
Yeah. Yeah. We both can surf. I’m not nearly as good as Kara. I kind of just stand up.

Chris Cooper (32:29):
Yeah. That’s cool. That’s cool. OK, Ashley. So, this is—there are a lot of gym owners listening to this, and they’re like, “Ah, I’m frigging mopping my floor at 10 o’clock at night. I’m listening to this. Like, why do I—why should I even care about building my dream lifestyle and building a plan to get there and like designing it and talking to my spouse about it? Like, this is my life. It’s never going to change.” Right? What do you say to those people?

Ashley Haun (32:54):
You only get one of them. You only get one life. And if mopping the floor at 10 o’clock at night is really and truly what you want over and over again, great. But if it’s not truly what you want, if you’re resentful a little, even just a little bit about it, then go out and find somebody that has done one thing that you’re inspired by and ask them how they did it. And start there; start with that and build momentum on, “OK, you know what? I liked that. I did that. I want to do the next thing.” And because it doesn’t have to be this way.

Chris Cooper (33:29):
That’s great. And the beautiful part is that if you talk to somebody who works a 9 to 5, they’re working in middle management or something, they don’t have a lot of freedom on how they set up their lifestyle, but entrepreneurship gives you that freedom. And if you’re a gym owner, you’re doubly lucky. Ashley, thanks so much for coming on. Where can people reach you if they want to start setting up their dream lifestyle?

Ashley Haun (33:51):
Yeah. I’m on Instagram at braveashleyhaun. Facebook, same thing. Ashley Haun or www.ashleyhaun.com.

Chris Cooper (34:00):
So awesome. Thanks Ash.

Ashley Haun (34:01):
Thanks Coop.

The post Building Your Dream Lifestyle (It’s Harder Than You Think) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Why Gym Owners Have Poor Lifestyles

“You own a gym—you must work out all the time!”

“You’re an entrepreneur—you can work whenever you want!”

I’m sure you’ve heard both of these lines from family or friends. You and I know the real story: We skip workouts because we’re so busy with gym tasks, and we have the worst boss in the universe (ourself).

When you’re in Founder Phase, the first stage of entrepreneurship, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to work long hours. That’s a given. It’s unavoidable.

When you’re in Farmer Phase, you’re going to be stressed and distracted by staffing and money issues. That’s also unavoidable, too.

But entrepreneurs have poor lifestyles for different reasons. Read on. I’ll tell you why gym owners are overworked, stressed out and often ready to close or sell.

Seven Stumbling Blocks

1. You’re a martyr. You confuse gym ownership with a noble purpose and profitability with greed. Yes, your gym performs a valuable service. Yes, you like your job. No, you shouldn’t feel guilty about making money and doing something you love. You didn’t take a vow of poverty when you opened your gym, and neither did your kids.

2. You think nobody can do it as well as you can. True, nobody can do everything you can do. But someone can do one thing you do better than you can. For example, some people love to clean, and they’re better at it than you are. Someone else loves Instagram, and they’re better at it than you are. You probably need several people to take roles off your plate, but you can’t take time off because you’re looking for a unicorn to replace you—and they don’t exist.

3. You’re so stressed that you can’t think about anything else. Even when you’re at home, all you can think about is work. This is because your brain literally rewires itself to optimize for “fight or flight,” and you start looking for fights and threats. Sometimes you even break things in your business just so you can fix them and feel important and needed.

4. You don’t have a model to follow, so you’re blindly just kinda hoping that more members will solve your problem.

5. You’re scared, and that makes you jealous and suspicious about competition. And nobody wants to be around a scared, jealous cynic.

6. You think money will solve all of your problems. Money is good at solving money problems, it’s true—but not all of your problems are money problems.

7. You think money is evil. Hey, we were all brought up to think that. It’s not your fault. But you need to understand that money is a tool. It’s a tool that helps you keep your gym open. And it’s a tool your clients can trade for accountability and coaching that will give them a better lives.

Sure, there are more reasons entrepreneurs don’t live well. But what do the ones listed above have in common? They’re in your head.

You build the life you imagine. Forget “manifest destiny” and all that woo-woo stuff. If you want to have a better lifestyle, you need to make a better lifestyle your goal. You need to paint a clear picture of what you want in your head and then find someone who can walk you through the steps to get there.

If that’s you and you’re ready to get out of your head and into the next phase of your life, book a call with my team.

The next phase is better—I promise.

The post Why Gym Owners Have Poor Lifestyles appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Six Fs: How to Create a Lifestyle as an Entrepreneur

How are you doing financially? You can probably give me a number, right?

How’s your family life? That’s harder to measure.

How about your faith? Uhhh … .

When you ascend to the Tinker Phase of entrepreneurship, you might find that you need to restore some balance to your life. If you’re like me, you’ve been thinking about your business so much for so long that you can’t think about anything else.

Here’s a tool we use with entrepreneurs in Tinker Phase. It’s called a “self-check-in,” and it comes from Bonnie Skinner of LevelUp Coaching.

First, measure how you’re doing in each of six categories (we call them “The Six Fs”). Create a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Define what a 10 means to you, then define what a 5 means to you—and so on.

The categories:

Fitness—This is your physical and emotional capacity to meet your challenges. Are you ready? Can you manage your stress and your physical output demands—and your response to both? Can you last long enough to finish the race?

Finances—Do you have the capital necessary to invest in your big goals, and are you prepared for the increased financial risk at this stage?

Freedom—Do you have enough wealth to create choice? Are you free to spend your time and money in constructive ways? Do you have enough positive constraints to ensure you stay focused?

Family—This is the sum of all of your relationships. Are you surrounded by the right people? Do your relationships make you happy or angry or sad? Who surrounds you, and where are they taking you? Where are you taking them?

Faith—This handle represents the belief that order exists amid chaos, that we are not helplessly falling, that we have control over our destiny, that happiness is attainable.

Future—Do you have a goal? Do you have a clear vision of what you’d like to achieve next? Do you have a plan to get there? Are you focused?

A Quarterly Exercise

Every quarter, rate where you’re sitting in each of The Six Fs.

For example, if Fitness is a 9 but Family is a 3, take action to improve your Family score in the next quarter. Schedule dates with your spouse. Book a family vacation. Set up a “no phones” rule between dinner and bedtime, etc.

Your life can’t be broken into two simple pieces of “work” and “not work.” You are a complex person living a complex life in a complex world. Your world can become imbalanced.

But you, as an entrepreneur, work best with concrete goals: The best way to bring your life back into balance is to set goals for everything in your life.

The post The Six Fs: How to Create a Lifestyle as an Entrepreneur appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

High-Efficiency Entrepreneur: Systems for Work-Life Balance

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Hey, welcome to “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m here with Joleen and Leighton Bingham, and I invited them onto the show because I want you to hear how many things they do in their life—all of them are amazing—and how they balance them. So, guys, welcome to “Run a Profitable Gym.”

Joleen Bingham (00:16):
Thanks for having us.

Chris Cooper (00:18):
Yeah. So pumped to have you both, and especially together. Let’s talk about what you’ve got going on in your life.

Joleen Bingham (00:24):
Oh, where to start? Well, obviously we own a gym, multiple gyms actually. We own one together. I co-own another gym with somebody else. We just brought our youth back into our main location. We own nine doors in real estate currently—manage those, self-manage those as well. We—I know, right? We have three children: a 17-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 5-year-old. All play different sports at various levels. From varsity basketball to kindergarten basketball to coding classes. And I know I’m missing a lot of stuff, so—

Leighton Bingham (00:56):

Parkour, gymnastics, basketball. Yeah.

Joleen Bingham (00:59):
Yeah. The whole laundry list of kids’ things that everybody else does. We both—

Chris Cooper (01:04):
What about travel?

Joleen Bingham (01:05):
Travel, yeah, we can get travel in there. So, we—I personally travel every quarter to go to some awesome Tinker meetup locations. We just came back from a cruise two weeks ago. Planning our next family vacation to Peru at this point for the summer.

Leighton Bingham (01:21):
What about the last 13 months?

Joleen Bingham (01:22):
Oh, the last 13 months. So, we could go over all the locations that we’ve been in the last 13 months. We actually talked about it yesterday, and it was a little insane.

Leighton Bingham (01:29):
Yeah.

Joleen Bingham (01:30):
All the places.

Chris Cooper (01:31):
Let’s hear it.

Joleen Bingham (01:32):
Greece, Sweden, Portugal. Where else am I missing? Greece, Sweden, Portugal. And then Colorado multiple times because we own properties there. San Diego, Texas, Chicago, Nashville, and many other camping trips with our children. And basketball locations. So, my daughter plays a travel basketball team, and we were in Alabama for that as well.

Chris Cooper (01:53):
And you’re both on the Two-Brain mentor team too?

Leighton Bingham (01:55):
Yep.

Joleen Bingham (01:56):
Yep.

Chris Cooper (01:56):

Amazing.

Joleen Bingham (01:58):
That was a lot all at once.

Chris Cooper (01:59):
Yeah. I mean, do you sleep?

Joleen Bingham (02:01):
I do actually, surprisingly. I am in bed usually before 10 o’clock at night.

Chris Cooper (02:07):
And Leighton, it wasn’t too long ago that you were still in the military, right?

Leighton Bingham (02:10):
Correct. Yeah, so I actually retired, what is it? Three—

Joleen Bingham (02:14):
Two and a half years.

Leighton Bingham (02:14):
Two and a half years ago now. So, we were, you know, doing part of the gym there and then doing full-time military during the day, so.

Chris Cooper (02:24):
Wow. Alright, well we’ve shared your kind of origin story on here in the past, and I think we even talked about the expansion into the second gym, and Joleen’s been on just to talk about building staff journeys and careers and stuff too. But what I’d really like to pick up the story at is where you started like, “OK, now let’s get into property, and let’s also have this travel scheduled out.” Like, when did all that stuff start happening?

Joleen Bingham (02:50):
I would say right after COVID, and I know I have spoken up about this before, but COVID was really the catalyst for us starting to take action and do other things. And actually, the catalyst for our gym to grow, which is a whole different story in itself. But with the travel, I had grown up traveling. My grandfather was a professor of international relations. So, he would take me to different countries with him when he ran the college trips. And I wanted my kids to experience the same—different cultures and meeting different people and seeing different things. And then after COVID I realized, well, why not now? Right? We’ve been in one place and for a long time we haven’t been able to go anywhere. I’m tired of this. Let’s just go see and do new things. So, when we sat down and figured out our plan for the year, it included: Aright, well, we’re going to take time and set aside money for it instead of buying all these extra things that we want. We’re going to devote some of that to experiences for our kids.

Chris Cooper (03:44):
But still, I mean, OK, so you guys have the money because you have so many successful things, but it’s really the time, right? And how do you possibly carve out the time to do all those things and then carve out even more time to travel?

Joleen Bingham (03:57):
So, it’s very scheduled. And I know that that’s a struggle for a lot of people. It is very scheduled down to the minute on our calendars. I have very good systems where each person is color-coded on our calendar. Each day of the week is devoted to a different thing for me personally. I know Leighton might have a different system for his schedule and fitting that in, but all of the things that we do, we block off a week on our calendar, and we make it happen at the beginning of the year. So, for example, our trip in August, we’ve already blocked that off. We already know when that’s going to happen. And so, when we’re looking at “Where do we fit our work in? Where do we fit, maybe a renovation that has to come to the property?” we’re not going to schedule things around those things that are already planned out.

Chris Cooper (04:38):
Wow. OK. So, if you’re listening, here’s a prompt to this interview. I sent Joleen and Leighton a text. I’m like, “You guys got a lot going on. I don’t know how you do it.” And Joleen says—

Joleen Bingham (04:50):
Systems. Systems and scheduling.

Chris Cooper (04:51):
Yeah, “I got a system.”

Joleen Bingham (04:54):
Yep.

Chris Cooper (04:54):
OK. Well, what I’d love to do before we actually give people the system or teach them how to build a system is: Let’s get really specific. So, let’s start with your gyms. Tell me about your two gyms.

Joleen Bingham (05:04):
Yeah, so our adult location is primarily personal training at this point. We do a little bit of semi-private, and I would say it’s about 85% personal training. We own that one together. We have an amazing team that helps us and allows us to travel, but also helps us run it. And then our secondary one is corrective exercise. I co-own that with a woman who has 20-some years of experience in the field of physical therapy. And she is very much the hands-on, technical part of it, and I run the business side of it. Our youth one, the school district decided not to renew our lease, so we’ve now combined that back into our adult one. And so, they’re running in the same location.

Chris Cooper (05:46):
OK. And on top of that, I saw a Facebook post from you that actually prompted the conversation, where now you’re looking to partner with or acquire other gyms in the area too. Is that right?

Joleen Bingham (05:55):
Yeah, so I really like creating systems, obviously the whole reason we’re here. And I like helping business owners develop those and run them and be able to have the time in the day that I have. But some gym owners just want to coach. They love the coaching side of it. They don’t want to run the business side of it. And that’s what I would like to help them with outside of that.

Chris Cooper (06:15):
So good. And marketing too, I think, right? Is that Leighton’s? Yep.

Joleen Bingham (06:18):
That would be where Leighton takes over.

Chris Cooper (06:20):
That’s fantastic. I know our friend Per is doing something very similar in Sweden where, you know, he partners with a gym and does like an equity stake and then he brings the gym into Two-Brain and then, you know, and it’s awesome. OK. Well now, let’s talk about property. So, you said that you have nine doors. I don’t think that fully paints the picture of what you guys have going on. Do you want to share that?

Joleen Bingham (06:42):
Yeah, so we have—well, I’m going to let Leighton share that. That’s his thing. I don’t need to speak the whole time.

Leighton Bingham (06:48):
Well, so we have obviously our Airbnb in Colorado.

Chris Cooper (06:52):
Beautiful.

Leighton Bingham (06:53):
Yeah. Which was actually our second house. She owns one by herself, a single-family home. Then we have another duplex here in Pennsylvania. We have a quadplex here in Pennsylvania.

Joleen Bingham (07:07):
And then our primary home.

Leighton Bingham (07:08):
Then our primary home. Yep.

Joleen Bingham (07:09):
And then I’m also—I also am half-owner on another house still currently too.

Leighton Bingham (07:013):
Yeah.

Chris Cooper (07:14):
How much time does that take? Like my worst nightmare—I have commercial buildings because I’m worried about getting that 3 a.m. phone call about the clogged-up toilet. Right. So, like how much time does this take for you?

Leighton Bingham (07:24):
Well, so, as long as there’s—well, time. Well, I’ve got a few 3 a.m. phone calls or 1 a.m. phone calls when a tree—when two trees—fell on our quadplex. But as far as time, I mean, depends on the week, but yeah, five to 10 hours a week, just kind of fielding phone calls or fielding text or whatever. Recently, we just had to put two new tenants in there, so that required a little bit more time, but it’s, you know, it’s only about 20 hours a month to manage them too, so.

Chris Cooper (07:56):
And how do you guys do the one that’s way—I think you said it’s Colorado but might have been Montana.

Joleen Bingham (08:01):
Colorado.

Chris Cooper (08:02):
Yeah. How do you manage that?

Joleen Bingham (08:03):
We have an amazing property manager in place who has compensated well. That’s planned into our rates that we charge. And I actually recently took it back over from a company that we had marketing it, just from like putting it on all the different platforms, and have been able to triple our rates and have better occupancy just by having that human touch in it.

Chris Cooper (08:25):
Amazing. I’m not surprised that staffing is one of the keys, I’m sure, that you’re going to mention for your success. And I think you brought it up in every case so far, but let’s talk about systems. So, Joleen, when you’re starting this, do you make a plan for the year, or are these just systems that have kind of organically evolved over time?

Joleen Bingham (08:43):
I think it’s been a combination of both. You know, they had to organically evolve because life throws you curveballs, and then you have to figure out how to fix that. But now we’re at the point where we sit down, and we have planned in January this year—we normally try to do it in November or December—but in January and plan out our year. What do we want to accomplish? Where do we want to travel? Which, sometimes fun places come up, and you just have to go. Where do we want to travel? When are they fitting in the year? What do we need to make that happen? So, do we need to hire additional staff? Do we need to make more money, more revenue because that’s a key part of it. How are we going to do that? So, we have our family plan, and then we have our business plans. And those two—I know when we talk about work-life balance, they still have to be integrated with each other.

Leighton Bingham (09:27):
Well, and I think we also have like somewhat of individual goals or plans as well. As long as they mesh well, they work with the plan, and so.

Chris Cooper (09:39):
Can you give me an example of that, Leighton?

Leighton Bingham (09:41):
So, last year I was like, “OK, I want to go back to doing CrossFit, and I want to do a competition, but I also want to buy more property.” So, the CrossFit competition was my thing, and then buying more property was an “us” thing. Not that I—actually, it wasn’t last year, but the year before, I think, that I did the CrossFit competition, and I hated it.

Chris Cooper (10:02):

I didn’t expect you to say that. It caught me off guard.

Joleen Bingham (10:06):
I didn’t either, actually.

Leighton Bingham (10:08):
I was like, “This hurts. Everything just hurts.”

Chris Cooper (10:12):
So how do you, how do you resolve that? So, let’s say that like the work goal is in conflict with the personal goal. Like, we want to make an extra hundred thousand, but we also want to work less. Or maybe it’s in conflict with like, you know, the family goal, the work goal or the personal goal. What happens if there’s a conflict somewhere in that trifecta?

Joleen Bingham (10:30):
So, I can tell you what—for me, the family goal always comes first, right? So, my hierarchy is family goal, personal goal, work goal, right? So, if I have to make a decision, this one, the family one’s always going to come. But I also, every single time that comes up, I ask myself a question, and I know I heard it somewhere on Two-Brain, but: “If I say yes to this, what else in my life am I saying no to?” Right? So, if I say yes to an opportunity that makes me more money, is that thing I have to say no to, is that less important to me that I’m OK saying no to it?

Chris Cooper (11:03):
Very interesting. OK. I think that question is going to come up again in a moment. So, when you’re sitting down, and the two of you are setting up kind of your family goals for the year, what does that look like? Do you go away someplace? How do you start the conversation? Are you taking notes? Walk us through that.

Leighton Bingham (11:20):
Yeah, so we do a destination away from the kids. And this year, how many days is it this year?

Joleen Bingham (11:27):
Three.

Leighton Bingham (11:27):
Three days this year. Last year, it was only a day or a day and another half day. But there are some questions that kind of prompt it. Like, we do have, like “What do you want to accomplish in the next year?” or “What didn’t you accomplish last year?”

Joleen Bingham (11:46):
So, there’s a template, basically, of questions that we run through from start to finish, starting with, “Did we accomplish everything we wanted to? Why or why not?” And then, you know, overarching plans, individual plans, timeline for each of those, KPIs for each of those, and how that’s going to happen.

Chris Cooper (12:03):
Incredible. And maybe walk us through how you do it for your business too. So, if you’re listening at home, I’m going to preface this by saying Joleen is one of our most popular mentors in Two-Brain. And every year at this time, every gym goes through this process of annual planning, and it starts with the “perfect day” of the owner. And then we tag revenue goals and profit goals to that. And then we back out the revenue goals, et cetera. And all the metrics that you need to hit to get to that personal goal. Joleen is amazing at this. I’m sure nobody is surprised by this point, but Joleen, can you just walk us through, like, how do you go from those personal goals to the gym goals and set up your gym’s annual plan?

Joleen Bingham (12:43):
OK. So, one of the things that we have to identify first to set up our gym’s annual plan is how much money we want to make from the gym and how much of that we need, basically for all the things that we want to accomplish. Once we have that, one of the biggest things that I also need to look at is how much staffing do I need? So, I’ll look at how much do I want to make? Do I need to add any more staffing to do all the extra things that I want to do? So, are there things that I have to give up? So, maybe I need a 30% increase in staff costs in order to take on some of the additional things. I think that’s one of the things that gets forgotten a lot. And then recurring revenue—or not revenue, sorry. Expenses. I’ve been running through these so much in the last few weeks.

Joleen Bingham (13:23):
Do we have any increases coming up? Did we lose a sublease? Did we gain a new sublease? Are our costs going through the roof with inflation? And coming up with that overall number. Then when I just ran through this with our gym—it’s actually on my list to finish up this week—it’s a number we’re not at right now, where I want to be for next year. And then we break it down even further. OK, so here’s the number we need to be at; here’s where we’re at. What do we need to add additional? What do we need to stop doing that might be actually costing us money? And that was a big one that I looked at. And then how are we going to make that happen? Like what are the exact steps that we’re going to do? So, a lot of times when I work with a gym, it’s, you know, they’ll come with, “OK, well we’re going to do digital marketing.” “OK, great, let’s come up with the exact plan for that. How much money are we going to spend on that? How are you going to monitor the metrics?” So, we just break it down in even more detail. I like numbers a lot, if you can’t tell from listening to me talk.

Chris Cooper (14:15):
No, I love this. And in fact, I’d love to just throw something that I didn’t prep you for. And that is, so let’s say that a gym owner says, “OK, I want to put a down payment on an Airbnb. I need $96,000. OK, 8,000 more per month in, you know, take-home or whatever to be able to do that.” How do you, from there, build a plan out to help them get there?

Joleen Bingham (14:40):
Yeah, that’s great because I just did that last week with somebody actually. Not for a house, but they needed more money. So, we look at current expenses, obviously where they are currently. Is there anything that we can do an expense audit and cut that and provide them an immediate boost in owner’s benefit. Yep. But then, OK, you need an additional $8,000? What are your revenue streams that you can pull the levers on currently? What do you currently have, right? If you’re doing personal training, is there an opportunity for more? If you don’t have personal training, let’s talk about adding that and how to sell that. Are there specialty programs that your clients have wanted, but you’re not offering right now? Right. And so, we talk about: How do we stack on top of or sell more of what you currently have? And then before we are done with that: What staff do you need to make this happen? Because you can’t add $8,000 worth of revenue yourself and implement all of it yourself. And then taking into account the staff costs. OK, now you’ve added $8,000 worth of revenue, but you’ve added $2,000 staff costs, so now we’ve got to add more. Making sure they’re getting what they want.

Chris Cooper (15:42):
I love it. And the reason I really wanted to go deep with that is because when—if I said to a gym owner, “How are you going to make an extra $5,000 next year?” Their answer is always going to be, “Marketing, but I’m just going to market better.” Right? But that’s not it. And you know, the expenses, the staff costs: You have to figure all those things in. And if you’re listening at home or while driving, you might think, “Wow, this is complicated.” But actually, it’s not. When you work one-on-one with a mentor, and they’re guiding you through it and asking the questions and clarifying—like, I always have to work with somebody else to pull this stuff out of me, or else I just can’t do it. Just pivoting to you for a second man. So, Leighton is a marketing specialist at Two-Brain, and he gets on these calls, and he helps people set up their ad accounts and gets their ads going and tweaks them, et cetera. Leighton, how big—like how important is marketing to the overall solution when somebody says, “I have a specific goal of making an extra $50,000 next year?”

Leighton Bingham (16:37):
I think that’s a good question. The reason why I say that is because there’s—it’s twofold. Organic marketing plays a huge role into it because if you don’t build your avatar client, and you’re not marketing through organic marketing, that’s a big issue because you’re not going to be drawing in the people—I get so many people in—like, we get so many people in the door saying, “Oh, I’ve seen your Facebook post, I’ve seen your Instagram post, or whatever.” But then, I think the paid ads play like a 50/50 role, you know what I mean? So, and with the paid marketing, we can reach new people versus everybody that just sees your organic marketing over and over and over. But I really think it’s individual per gym as far as like, how big of a role it plays. So, but for us, it plays a pretty significant role. We do—well, she does the organic marketing; I do the paid ads. And I keep like upping our ad spend budget.

Chris Cooper (17:40):
OK.

Leighton Bingham (17:41):
But we’re seeing an ROI on it. So, I don’t see why, you know, like you could make $50,000 a year, and if you spend 10,000 on ads and you’re getting an ROI on the 10,000, I don’t see what the problem is.

Chris Cooper (17:58):
Yeah, exactly. It’s an investment when you know what you’re doing, not at expense. It makes sense. So, I was about to ask you guys like what are your biggest points of leverage to buy back your time, but I think one of your biggest levers is each other. It really sounds like you have a very complimentary working relationship. I mean, Joleen, not many people come on here and say, “I love systems, and here’s my husband who loves marketing.”

Joleen Bingham (18:22):

Right.

Chris Cooper (18:22):
Would you guys agree with that? Like, do you lever each other?

Joleen Bingham (18:25):
I think so, and I think one of the important parts is that we reassess the things that we like to do in the business frequently. Right? So, when he came—when he left the military and he came back to working in the business, there were things that he wanted to work on. And then I realized that they weren’t being enjoyed very much. So, we did a reassessment and said, “OK, these are the things you love and that you want to work on. These are the things you don’t love and you want to work on.” So, let’s find somebody to take them on. And the same thing for my roles, right? Like every six months I’ll sit there, and I’ll say, “Do I still enjoy doing this?”
Yes. I’m going to keep doing it.”

Chris Cooper (18:57):
Oh, very cool. Very cool.

Joleen Bingham (18:58):
So, I think while we leverage each other, it’s also reassessing what we’re doing. Is it still working? And are we still the best person for it in our business? Because that might not always be true.

Chris Cooper (19:07):
And what if it’s not?

Joleen Bingham (19:09):
Then somebody else needs to do it.

Chris Cooper (19:10):
You hire somebody?

Joleen Bingham (19:11):
Right. Or one of—or we’ll swap it, right? So, for example, you know, the most recent one is some of that organic stuff. Yep. Right. I just naturally will talk to people. It’s something I’m good at. It’s something that he doesn’t want to do from an organic marketing standpoint. He’s really good at the ads. I’m not. So, we might swap that out. Now, I’ll never take the ads from him because that would not work.

Chris Cooper (19:34):
Just, you know, full disclosure, Leighton is one of two or three people that work on ads from my gym, and I would never take that from them either. So, I get that. Yeah.

Joleen Bingham (19:43):
No, I look at it, and I see numbers, and while I love numbers, I don’t love them in Meta’s background. So.

Chris Cooper (19:49):
Yeah, I get that. OK. So, you are each others’ levers. That’s good. How else—like what are some other big levers that you can pull that create time and financial freedom for you? It seems like personal brand might be one, Joleen.

Joleen Bingham (20:04):
It is. Personal brand, for me, has made a lot of connections. And I think that that’s the biggest one. I resisted doing personal branding for so long. Everybody kept saying, “You need to build your brand; you need to build your brand.” I was like, “No, I’m just going to post my kids on Facebook. Nobody cares about what I do.” And then realizing that people saw what I did, and they made a connection to it, and they realized that they could leverage something from me too. And I know that sounds horrible, but that’s really how we build—that’s how you build things, right? You leverage connections with other people and the relationships. So, from those connections, we’ve been able to make investments that allow us to have more time, right? So, while the real estate is time consuming, it also provides us a source of freedom, right? Like, he might do five hours a week, but they can be whenever. So, we can go to our kids’ sporting events; we can be there at their school. We can show up when we need to show up. And I think circling back to when we talk about work life balance, that’s the biggest thing is that freedom of time. Like I’m not sitting here saying I don’t work a lot, but I work when I want to work, and I work around the things that are important to me.

Chris Cooper (21:11):
How integrated are your kids in the business?

Joleen Bingham (21:15):
They—well, they’re employees of the business. First of all, they actually do some work.

Chris Cooper (21:18):
Literally. Yeah.

Joleen Bingham (21:19):
Literally, our employees in the business. My teenager does some social media, and my kids are part of pictures and marketing and things like that, but they’re there all the time. So, my son, his favorite thing is to come and do math on the whiteboards at the gym. My daughter loves the rings. They are her favorite thing to do. So, they’re there frequently. They like being there because we’ve made it a happy, positive place for them to be. And my teenager trains with us for sports.

Chris Cooper (21:48):
They’re also a big part of your personal brand, I think too, Joleen. Like, I look at your stuff on Facebook because I don’t really look at Instagram, and what I see is like, here is somebody who can do so much. And on days when I’m feeling overwhelmed, like I can’t keep all these balls in the air, I’m like, man, Joleen’s doing way more than me. Keep paying attention to Joleen.

Joleen Bingham (22:09):
Thank you.

Chris Cooper (22:10):
Yeah, yeah, sure. In fact, you know, I didn’t even think of integrating the family into the businesses until you brought that up. But this summer we were cutting grass at one of our buildings, and my brother-in-law goes by, and he is like, “Ah, sucker, you’re out here on a hot day, and you’re cutting the grass.” And my son turns to me, and he says, “How many hours a month do we work at this place?” And I said, “I don’t know, three?” And he is like, “How much do we make a month?” And I said, “$12,000.” And he’s like, “So, $4,000 an hour is what we’re making to cut the grass?” “Yep.” “Oh, I got it. OK.”

Joleen Bingham (22:44):
I love it. I love that story.

Chris Cooper (22:46):
Yeah. So, it was just like—to see that teenager brain kick over like, “Ah, right.” Would you say that your kids are aware that they’re part of the business or like working in the business with you?

Joleen Bingham (22:59):
Yeah, so it’s a funny story. We were actually driving to school one day and talking about the businesses. And my son—he’s seven now, but I think he was six when he brought this up—said, “So if we buy more gyms, we get to make more money. Right, Mom?” I said, “Well, yes, but there’s a lot more work that has to go into that.” He’s like, “But we make more money, right?” And then now, they recently—they want to open their own business within this one. So, they want to have their own things where they sell to people coming into our business to make money for themselves.

Leighton Bingham (23:30):

Yeah, cakes. They want to bake cakes inside the gym.

Chris Cooper (23:34):
Maybe on the way out of the gym is when I buy the cake.

Joleen Bingham (23:37):
Yeah. But it’s there. I do.

Chris Cooper (23:38):
Product market fit. I mean, that’s perfect, right? By the way, if you’re not following Joleen on Instagram and Facebook, you need to do it because her son, especially, is brilliant. Like this kid is one day going to open Three-Brain Business because he is like three times as smart as the average person. So, that’s awesome guys. What I’d love to hear is just kind of like, what is your weekly schedule? Has that just kind of like organically evolved, or are you planning this out ahead, writing down a schedule, and then just like following it?

Joleen Bingham (24:08):
Yep. So, I actually—a way long time ago, the schedule was a mess. So, this all came at why I’m good at this from being a mess to begin with. I started planning my weekly schedule, and because of all the different things we do, I had to allocate certain periods of time to each thing. I can move back and forth things pretty quickly, but it’s just annoying to do, and you lose time. So, Monday is a day where I go do an athletics class at my kids’ school. It’s a fun thing. I just do it for them. And then I have the rest of the day to have meetings with staff. It’s dedicated to my one gym business. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I dedicate to Two-Brain mentoring, but between very specific hours. So, for example, Tuesday mornings, I start at 5 a.m. my time because I work with gyms in Europe, and I want them to be able to do the same things that I say, like, “When you’re home with your kids, be present” and not have to be at home doing a call with their child. So, I do the 5 a.m. calls for them.

Chris Cooper (25:06):
Wow.

Joleen Bingham (25:06):
I love that time of day. I might be weird with that, but I love that time of day. And then Friday is my catch-all day. And I think this is where I’ve—the biggest system that helped me is having that, OK, if I didn’t get anything done, if I need to meet with somebody, if there’s something that came up, that catch-all, even if it’s only a couple hours, it allows me to go in the weekend and be present with my kids and family. So, it’s three hours that I don’t touch at all.

Chris Cooper (25:31):
How do you avoid distractions? This is for both of you. So, you’re—I know what it’s like to be a mentor. You’re on this call. When we hang up, you’re going to look at your phone, there’s going to be 12 texts, three Slacks—maybe not, because I’m also on this call—but like five emails. How do you avoid distraction when you’re doing one thing?

Joleen Bingham (25:51):
Yep, so turning things on Do Not Disturb: number one thing. The one thing that I want to trial at home, and I know this has been brought up before, is they have those phone lockboxes. And so, for somebody who might actually be distracted during the day at work, that might be helpful for them—putting their phone in the phone lockbox. Do Not Disturb on my computer. And then, just continually repeating to myself, “These are the hours for this time.” So, if somebody comes to me and says, “Hey, I need you to do this.” I can do it then when I have it allocated for that. But that’s how my brain works, and I’m really good at doing it that way. But I’m not—

Chris Cooper (26:25):
Does it still take some practice too, Joleen? Sorry to cut you off.

Joleen Bingham (26:27):
Oh yeah, yeah. No, it definitely takes practice. And it’s always that question again, “If I say yes to this and change my schedule, what now has it messed up for me later in the week?” Right? Like, what does that sick kid do? If I’m the one staying home with them, what do I need to shift everywhere else?

Chris Cooper (26:41):
That’s great. I think it’s a really, really good tool that will help people get used to second-order thinking. Like, what is the downstream effect of doing this? And you know, what Joleen said earlier was, “If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?” I think that’s a fantastic exercise. So, Leighton, I think I’ve said this to you before, but I actually think that your superpower is really deep focus. Like, when you’re focused on one thing, you’re not distracted by something else. Like how do you—how do you do that? How do you stay on one field of play at a time and partition your attention?

Leighton Bingham (27:13):
Well, so, I do have like hyper focus. So, a little bit of Asperger’s, ADHD, so I’m just naturally, we’ll say, gifted that way. And I turn on my Do Not Disturb. But I also use an app to plan my days and the tasks that I need to accomplish. And then they send me reminders. So, and then everything else unfortunately gets blocked out. So, like you said, I’ll have 12 text messages, five phone calls, you know, 16 emails. But those come after those things.

Joleen Bingham (27:52):
And I’ll say—

Chris Cooper (27:52):
Go ahead.

Joleen Bingham (27:53):
Sorry. No, I’ll say when he hyper focuses, even somebody speaking to him, he’s not going to hear it. And my son’s very gifted in the same way too, but it is really like he tunes everything out around him.

Chris Cooper (28:05):
I know a lot of entrepreneurs will claim, “Oh, I’ve got ADHD,” but true ADHD actually does come with that gift of hyper focus. Do you think that the other entrepreneurs who are saying like, “I just can’t focus; I’m so scattered.” Is it maybe just a case of them not being disciplined, or what is it?

Leighton Bingham (28:26):
I would say discipline is a big thing but also not being organized. That was—for a while, that was my largest issue. Once I became organized, then I could hyperfocus on everything that I wanted to do.

Chris Cooper (28:44):
Do you ever get tired when you’re going from one area of focus, like working on the real estate to “I’ve got to fix the marketing from my gym”?

Leighton Bingham (28:50):

No, because I do have time blocks, or I do one thing and then the next thing, but what was I going to say? Yeah, I don’t remember. Yeah, I don’t remember.

Chris Cooper (29:01):
Do you break up your day so that you’ve got, like work, exercise, work, kids, et cetera? Or is it just kind of like one long window of work, and now you’re done with work, and you’re onto working out, or?

Leighton Bingham (29:12):
Uh, no, it’s blocked. So, it’s work in the morning, kids, and then exercise, and then work for—what is it?—9 to 2:30, and then it’s home with the kids and wife.

Chris Cooper (29:27):
Love it. So, guys, I mean, we know that Jocko likes to say, “Discipline equals freedom.” In this case though, it’s less discipline, I think, and more planning is what you’re saying. Am I reading that right?

Joleen Bingham (29:38):
Yeah. Yes, very much so. And the acknowledgement that we do have three kids, which means, especially this time of year, one of them is going to be sick most likely every single week. And honestly, that is why—that’s why I built that catch-all time in there because I was getting so stressed out with losing that time and not having anywhere else to make it up with. And that was causing a lot of anxiety for me, so that’s why that specific block is in there.

Chris Cooper (30:06):
Joleen, you’ve been doing this for a while, and do you find that this actually gets easier as people become more successful because there’s less stress? Or do they become more successful as they get more disciplined at blocking their time to do the work?

Joleen Bingham (30:20):
I think the second thing. Yeah, it allows more clarity of thinking too because you’re not trying to worry about five things at one time. You can focus on getting the one thing done you need.

Chris Cooper (30:29):
What do you tell mentees? Like if they’re just starting out and they’re coming into the program, they’re like, “Oh, I’m so overwhelmed. I got all this stuff to do. How can I do this work that you’re giving me?” Like how do you coach them into getting the work done?

Joleen Bingham (30:38):
We start with creating a schedule they can work around, and they still might be coaching 20 to 30 hours a week on the floor, but we’ve got to find at least one block of time where they can set aside time just to work on the things they need to with no other distractions. And showing people how important that is through my own stories is really what’s helpful for them.

Chris Cooper (30:57):
Yeah. Listeners, it’s not released yet, but thanks to Joleen’s experience and success in doing this, we now do this with every gym. Starting in January 2024, the first exercise you will do is carving out the time to do the work so that we know that you can do the things that will make you successful. So, thanks for that, Joleen. I mean that’s—it’s going to really help a lot of gym owners. Guys. If somebody said—they ran into you at Starbucks—“I’m a gym owner; I’d love to do all the stuff that you guys are doing. There just aren’t enough hours in my day.” Where would you tell them to start?

Joleen Bingham (31:30):
First of all, I’d tell them to find a mentor, right? That’s what I tell everybody. Find a mentor, and then sit down and really look at what you are actually doing. Because a lot of times you get the screen report from your phone, there’s six hours a day on your phone, seven hours a day on your phone. So, a time audit of: What are you actually doing? Have a third party come in and help you with: What do you need to accomplish? What are those main things you need to get done in order to make progress?

Leighton Bingham (31:55):
I think I think the annual plan is like a—like just the planning in general is a huge thing. Because I like to push forward about a thousand miles an hour and jump to the end of things. Like, I want all the glamorous things before I plan and make it happen. So, I think the planning is a huge thing too.

Chris Cooper (32:17):
So, before we sign off with Leighton and Joleen, I’ve asked her to get very specific. So, she’s going to go step by step in how she actually plans her day to get all this stuff done.

Joleen Bingham (32:27):
So, and it might—this might seem a little bit long, but I sit down, and I say, “OK, I am working on these three things today,” right? So, I know Monday, I work from 9 to 2:30 on my business. Very specific: 9 to 2:30. Nothing outside those hours because the rest of the time is devoted to my kids. So, if I need to accomplish these three things, when are they happening in that time? Well, from 9:50 to 11:20, I’m at my son’s school, so they’re not happening there. My workout is before that, so it’s not happening there. So, I will very clearly, on my calendar for the day, actually draw in when I’m accomplishing three specific things I need to get done that day. Tuesday—

Chris Cooper (33:06):
And what happens if you don’t get it done? I’m sorry.

Joleen Bingham (33:08):
Oh, no. I—what happens if I don’t get it done? This is where the discipline comes in. Those are the things I have to accomplish that day. That means after my kids go to bed at night, I’ll accomplish those things.

Chris Cooper (33:17):
Wow, OK.

Joleen Bingham (33:18):
Yep. And I will say there are caveats, like if I’m sick, I’m not going to make myself more sick by staying up. You’ve got to give yourself some grace. Tuesday/Thursday, I have a block from 5 to 7 a.m. for mentoring, and then on my calendar, I draw out from 7 a.m. to 8:30 is when I get my kids ready and get them to school. Like, it’s very, very specifically time blocked. And I just want to make people aware that you can’t be too specific on your calendar, right? I know people are like, “Oh, I’m going to work from 9 to 2.” Well, what are you doing from 9 to 2? What are you actually accomplishing? So, then I might go in and from 9 to 1, I’m going to do mentoring calls; from 1 to 2:30, I’m going to work out; from 2:30 to 3:30, I’m going to pick my kids up.

Joleen Bingham (33:58):
And then the rest of the night is with my kids. So, I get very specific with the hours of the day and what’s happening through the whole rest of the week. So, I know when I said Friday is my catchall day—well, I’m still going to write out what is happening during that time. I’m not going to just leave it as an empty blank. So, whatever I didn’t accomplish—because maybe a sick child was at home—I’m going to draw on my calendar. This is what I’m doing from 9 to 10, 10 to 11, and so on. And for me, that accountability comes from seeing it there. Yeah.

Chris Cooper (34:28):
OK. And you might write that in like Thursday night or something?

Joleen Bingham (34:30):
Yes. Yep. I do everything the night before for the next day.

Chris Cooper (34:34):
Oh, fantastic. So, is this kind of like how you end your day? Do you reflect on what you’ve already done and make your plan for the next day?

Joleen Bingham (34:41):
Yes. Correct.

Chris Cooper (34:42):
OK.

Joleen Bingham (34:43):
Yeah.

Chris Cooper (34:43):
Incredible.

Joleen Bingham (34:44):
And all of that’s kind of on an overarching calendar, but the specifics of like what’s happening from 9 to 2, that’s in my daily planner. And I’m a paper person; I’m still old school with that, but those specifics are written there because if I put it on the Google calendar, it would be way too much for people.

Chris Cooper (35:00):
Do you save like your past calendars, the stuff that you’ve done?

Joleen Bingham (35:05):
I do.

Chris Cooper (35:06):
Do you just like stack them up? Do you—you could probably build a fort out of them right now, right?

Joleen Bingham (35:09):
I have a shelf, a bookshelf, in my office at home that has them, but I also take notes in them. And so, there’s a table of content, so when I need to refer back to the notes, I can find them.

Chris Cooper (35:18):
That’s so awesome. I’m going to start doing that. What I love to do is just like track words written. That’s a really important metric. I know that I’m like mentally healthy if I’m hitting 750 words a day. I know that my thoughts are more organized, and I’m more focused. So, that’s the only one that I track. I also use Google tasks to check off as I finish things. And so, I track those every week. Like how many things did I actually check off? But you will find out, like you’re gaming the system a little bit, right? Like “Start call with Leighton and Joleen on time”: Check. You know?

Chris Cooper (35:51):
I need some wins. Give me—you know.

Joleen Bingham (35:54):
That is—it’s very true though. And I think that’s important though for people who feel like they’re not accomplishing something. Put something in your checklist you can check off. It makes you feel good.

Chris Cooper (36:02):
Exactly. Oh, that’s an awesome little tidbit too. OK guys, thanks again for coming on, and yeah, we’ll post your contact info at Two-Brain and also your Instagram link too, Joleen.

Joleen Bingham (36:16):
All right, perfect. Thank you.

Chris Cooper (36:18):
Alright, well hey, thank you very much. I think this is actually going to help a lot of people who just feel overwhelmed, like they can’t do it all and they’re sacrificing the business for the family or vice versa, or they’re sacrificing their fitness for everything else. You know, Leighton and Joleen are amazing role models to me and everybody else in Two-Brain, and if you really want some inspiration on how important this planning is and what kind of lifestyle it can provide for you, you can follow Joleen on social media—and Leighton, if you can find him.

Leighton Bingham (36:47):
Yeah, well I just recently opened my account to friends, so.

Chris Cooper (36:51):
OK, well that’s great. Are you posting, like, “This is me driving 14 hours straight from Colorado to Texas?

Leighton Bingham (37:01):
No, actually, I didn’t do that. It’s more of the kids and thoughts of the day, that kind of stuff to encourage discipline and things moving forward.

Chris Cooper (37:10):
Awesome. Guys, thanks. Thanks so much for your service and your time.

Leighton Bingham (37:13):
No problem. Thanks for having us.

The post High-Efficiency Entrepreneur: Systems for Work-Life Balance appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Work-Life Integration: Is It Possible for Entrepreneurs?

Is work-life balance possible?

For an entrepreneur, it’s usually a challenge.

In the Founder Phase of entrepreneurship, the new business owner is doing everything personally. That means they’re busy, distracted and really not focused on anything else. In this phase, their family and friends are often asked to “be patient” while the business gains traction.

I don’t see any way around this phase.

The best strategy is just to get through it as fast as possible.

Farmer Phase

In the Farmer Phase of entrepreneurship, the business owner has a team and should be working less.

The challenge is internal: Their brain has evolved to look for problems. So the entrepreneur is constantly checking their phone when at home. Their partner often has to ask, “Are you listening to me?” and the relationship suffers—not because the owner is at the gym 15 hours a day anymore but because the entrepreneur can’t get the gym out of their head.

Managing staff is far harder than managing clients. This is the phase where entrepreneurs lose the most sleep, stress over a single text message and get burned out most often.

Naval Ravikant wrote this: “We say we want ‘peace of mind’ but really what we want is peace from mind.” In other words, we need to shut our brains off. This means finding hobbies that tax us mentally—not just hard workouts that tax us physically.

Tinker Phase

In Tinker Phase, the entrepreneur has gained a bit of time freedom but is now usually chasing a hundred ideas instead of enjoying the lifestyle that’s been earned. The gym runs itself, but instead of taking the summer to drive cross-country with their partner and kids, the owner is busy opening a coffee shop.

The key to this phase is what Dan Martell calls “work/life integration.” Dan’s strategy is to take his family with him when traveling, break up his day with activities that involve his kids and combine his recreation with work. For example, his mastermind groups meet at snowboarding parks.

This transition can be tough. But a good way to start is to take your team to a retreat. Rent a house for a weekend, talk about the future and then go to a ballgame together. When you meet with other gym owners, do it in a place you want to visit as a tourist (our last Tinker meetup was in San Diego, and the next is in Dallas).

I’m not sure work-life balance is possible even in more mature entrepreneurs. Over time, our brains actually change to look for problems (and create problems where there are none, just so we have something to do).

But on today’s episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Joleen and Leighton Bingham share what they do to find work-life balance, and they’re the masters. Check it out as a podcast or a video:

The post Work-Life Integration: Is It Possible for Entrepreneurs? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.