Chris Cooper's Blog, page 56

From Good Gym to Great: Discipline

Jocko Willink often says that “discipline equals freedom.”

When the retired Navy SEAL spoke at the Two-Brain Summit in 2021, he taught us that when you have discipline, you actually welcome challenging times. This is because disciplined units survive hard times, and no one else does.

Most gym owners would say they have great discipline: They can get up early, grind all day and go to bed late without complaint. Unfortunately, a great gym requires more: It requires a culture of discipline.

I like to think of “discipline” as “consistency.”

Your gym is only as good as its worst class, worst coach and worst system.

If you have four great coaches and one who’s just OK, you don’t have a great gym—you have an OK gym. Any client who works with your “OK” coach won’t have a great experience.

If you get amazing results but don’t answer your phone, you don’t have a great gym—because people can’t join.

If your gym is mostly clean, it’s not clean.

Discipline means that everyone on your team delivers to a level of excellence—while coaching, while opening the gym, while programming and even while cleaning.

A Culture of Discipline

Here’s how to build a culture of discipline, starting with your team:

1. Create a framework. Write down clear instructions for everything in your business, from cleaning the sinks to running a group class.

2. Create a measuring stick. What would earn your bathroom sink a 10/10 for cleanliness? What is a 10/10 group class? What is a 10/10 conversation for encouraging someone who finds your site to book a No Sweat Intro? And what’s a 10/10 No Sweat Intro look like? Use pictures, videos and checklists to make the 10/10 clear to everyone. (Two-Brain clients get all of these resources in our Toolkit.)

3. Bring your staff together and introduce your new standards. Say this: “Here is how we will run our business with excellence. Over the next hour, we can debate what a ’10/10′ means, but when we leave here today, we are all committing to following these frameworks.” If a staff person doesn’t want to pursue excellence in their role, you’ve got a different problem.

4. Begin measuring everyone’s progress. Rate your cleaner on their work. Evaluate your coaches. Review your programming. Report back to your team monthly: the good and the bad.

Your ultimate goal is to create freedom and responsibility within a framework, according to Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great.”

Here’s how it looks in practice:

1. Goal reviews for your clients. Are they getting the results they signed up to get? If not, evaluate your programming. (Sidebar: Most gyms never evaluate their programming because they never track their clients’ results. So the question of “which programming is best?” is moot. There are a lot of hard workouts on the internet. If they’re not producing results, they’re not good. And if you’re not measuring results, you can’t be great.)

2. Evaluations for your staff. Are they delivering your group classes to a 10/10 level? Build an evaluation form, working backward from your definition of a 10/10 group class. Deliver it to each staff person individually every quarter. Do the same thing for private and semi-private sessions.

3. Metrics for your business. You’re accountable for growing the pie for everyone else. Every month, track your key metrics: average revenue per member (ARM), length of engagement (LEG), effective hourly rate (EHR), client count, net owner benefit (NOB) and return on investment (ROI). Your staff are delivering your service; you’re making sure the ship stays afloat and on course.

Objections?

“But I just wanna coach!” I understand. But when you open a gym, your primary job becomes CEO, not coach.

“But what about certifications?” Many gym owners confuse having a great service with acquiring credentials. They’re not the same thing. Most of your clients care more about the class starting on time than they do about their “knees caving in” on the squat. Sorry, I wish that wasn’t true.

“But what about the community?” Yes, that’s important. But having a culture of discipline means preserving your community—removing the bad fits to allow the best to thrive. It means firing that sarcastic coach, removing that clique and no longer catering to everyone.

Having a great gym means building a culture of discipline, starting with the owner and including all staff. It means giving staff freedom within a framework. You don’t have to write a script for your coaches, but they must deliver the essentials with excellence.

Your gym is only as great as its weakest link.

The post From Good Gym to Great: Discipline appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Take Your Gym From Good to Great

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Every gym owner wants to own a great gym. In fact, we all want to own the best gym in town. I know that I do. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And today I’m going to tell you how to take your gym from good to great. And if you’re familiar with Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great,” some of these are going to be familiar to you, but I’m going to translate them into the gym world and show you exactly what you’ve got to do. So, let’s start with what great gyms have in common. After working with over 2,000 gyms worldwide, we’ve learned that a great gym can have 30 clients, it can have 300 clients, it can have no staff, or it could have 15 staff. It could be in a dingy warehouse, or it could be in this like pristine spa, right? What great gyms do have in common though, is not the client headcount.

Chris Cooper (00:46):
It’s not really their location. It’s that they all get clients the results that the client wants. They create a third place for their clients to go, which is like a place other than work or home, where the client just kind of wants to go as often as possible. Great gyms create good careers for their staff, and great gyms pay their owners more than the owner would make if they were working for somebody else at another gym. So, every gym is different in its own way. Even though we’ve worked with 2,000, none have been the same, but the great gym has at least three things in common. Okay? And today, I’m going to break down those three areas of commonality, and we’re actually going to start with the niche. So, let’s go here. I’m going to help you find your niche and identify it, and that’s going to actually increase the greatness of your gym and help you build all these other things too.

Chris Cooper (01:36):
So, the first exercise we’re going to do here is actually identify who your niche is. A lot of gyms who are struggling to get from good to great really don’t have a clear concept of this. They just think, “Well, we’re for everybody, and we’re going to try and attract anybody in our town who wants to work out.” But the reality is that the gyms who niche down—who know who their target audience is and who they can serve—they get their clients better results. They create a place that their clients really love to go. They create better opportunities for their staff, and they create better income for their owners. And they do that by niching down instead of trying to just please everybody. So, here’s how you do it. To find your niche, you’ve got to first think about your area of passion. Okay, like what are you most fired up about?

Chris Cooper (02:21):
You know, I love cycling, so for me, my area of passion might be cycling. For you, your area of passion might be CrossFit. That was mine for like a decade. Before that I was a powerlifter, so my area of passion might’ve been powerlifting. Okay? So, you want to put down your area of passion, whether it’s yoga, Pilates, CrossFit, bootcamp, strength and conditioning, HIIT—whatever you want to do, put that in your area of passion. Okay? Because I’ll tell you, we say that the method matters less than the model, and that’s very true. But the reality is that if you want to be great, your passion will show, and your clients will know. Next, you want to ask yourself: What can I be the best in town at? Okay? Now Collins, in his book, would talk about like best in the world, but he’s talking about massive companies.

Chris Cooper (03:05):
We’re talking about running gyms in your hometown. And so, you want to ask yourself: What can I actually be the best at? Now in a lot of cases, this might be something where you have no other competition. You might be the best at training people for hockey. You might be the best at training people for weight loss. You might be the best at training people for CrossFit competition. Or you might be the best at training golfers or cyclists or whatever that is. You want to determine a place where you know that you can actually be the best. The last thing you want to do is be the second-best CrossFit gym in town, because there’s a massive delta between the best and the second best. In fact, if you’re the second-best CrossFit gym in town, and your clients don’t differentiate you any other way, you’re really providing kind of a staircase to the best CrossFit gym in town because your best clients will ascend to them.

Chris Cooper (03:53):
And then third, you’ve got to look at: Where do the economics make sense? So maybe you can be like the best gym in town, but you can’t also be the cheapest gym in town. If you’re the best access gym in town, then the economics have to work to make sure that you can get new equipment and stuff. If you’re the best CrossFit gym in town, then you have to be charging more than the other CrossFit gyms, so that you can pay for the coaches and the staff, and the equipment and the space—all that stuff. Right? The economics have to work. So, to figure out if the economics work, what you want to take is clients, and you want to divide that into revenue to create average revenue per member. That’s ARM. Okay, you need to make sure that your ARM works. No matter if you’re running a group CrossFit model, a group yoga, Pilates model, whatever, one-on-one training, semi-private, it’s this metric that has to work for you.

Chris Cooper (04:46):
It’s not head count, it’s not even retention. It’s average revenue per member that you get per month, okay? That niche is really going to be defined by the thing that you’re passionate about, the thing that you can comfortably say that you are the best in town at, and also what the economics drive. For example, you might be passionate about CrossFit. You might be the best CrossFit coach in town, getting people the best CrossFit results in town. But if your ARM is too low, that niche is not going to work for you. Like, you know, you’re just not going to be able to make a living. Remember what the great gyms do, right? They get the clients the results that they want, okay? Check. They also make careers for staff. If your ARM is too low, it doesn’t matter how many clients you have, you’re not going to make great careers for your staff. You’re also going to have high churn. You’re not going to be able to make a great net owner benefit for you, the owner. And that’s what great gyms do. So, the economics have to work no matter what you’re doing. Let’s take this a different way. Let’s say that you’re personal training gym. Okay, so, you’ve got like a really high ARM; maybe you’re even the best personal trainer in town, and maybe that’s what you’re really passionate about—delivering one-on-one training to people. Okay? That’s great.

Chris Cooper (05:57):
So your ARM works, but you can’t reach scale because you’re just selling your time for money, right? So, you actually need something in the difference—in the middle there. But what is really important is average revenue per member. And most gyms running just a group model, their ARM is way too low for them to successfully build a great gym because the niche that they have just isn’t paying them enough. So, you know, you’re missing one here; you’re dividing by too low a number, okay? So great gyms have these three things in common: Their founder and their staff have a clear passion for what they’re doing. They’re the best in town at exactly what they’re doing, or maybe the only one in town. And the economics work. I want to give you an example here. So, in my town, uh, there’s a PhysEd teacher who trains hockey players in the summer, and he’s the only guy that focuses just on hockey, and he just runs it out of his garage.

Chris Cooper (06:54):
He makes about 40 grand a year doing this because he only focuses on hockey. And so, the hockey players think, “Well, if I’m serious, I need to go to this guy’s garage.” And he’s been doing it for a decade. He is the best in town at training hockey players, and he’s put people into the NHL or help them get there anyway. And so, the NHL players, when they come back, they come back to this guy’s gym. And so, the junior players, they see the NHL guys at this gym; they want to go there too, right? He’s creating this kind of like third space. Now, he doesn’t have any staff; he does it all himself because he is super passionate about it. And that really shows. So, he’s got the passion, he’s got the best in town, and the economics work because when you niche down, you can actually charge more for your service.

Chris Cooper (07:36):
Specialists charge more than generalists, and so niching down actually increases client value. Think about like, you need to buy brain surgery—whatever that is—and money is not an object. And you’re looking for the best person in the world. You’re probably thinking already like, “Well, the best person is going to charge the most.” Right? But in a lot of micro-gyms, that’s not what happens. You work really hard to become the best coach, provide the best gym, and then you base your pricing on what everybody else is doing. You can’t do that. The economics have to work. So, the first step in going from good to great is to identify that niche. Now, if you’re coming into this, you own a gym, you don’t know how to identify that niche, I’m going to give you an exercise right now to show you how to do that. Okay? This is really simple, and you can work with your mentor to get deeper on this if you want to.

Chris Cooper (08:24):
Okay, so if you’ve already got a gym, you’re like, “Ah, how do I niche down? I’ve got people who want weight loss. I’ve got people who want to touch their toes. I’ve got people who want to compete at CrossFit. How do I define who my best client is and focus on them?” Well, you’re going to make two lists. The first list is people who pay you the most money. This should be easy. You open up Wodify, Kilo, PushPress, Zen Planner, or whatever that is, and you print off what people are paying you. And then you just rank your top 10. So, top you know—Dave, Kim, whatever, Larry. Okay? And you just kind of go down that list in order. And the next thing that you do is you just close your eyes for a moment and think about the clients who feed you energy, who light you up when they show up. They come to your classes or your appointments, and you look forward to seeing them. They show up with batteries included.

Chris Cooper (09:14):
They raise the energy of everybody else that’s in the gym, okay? And you want to put their names here. One of my favorites is Boo. And then you got Lucy, and then you got Kim, and then you got Derek. Oh yeah, these are my favorite four. So now what I want you to do is I want you to look at both lists here, and say, “Who are the names who appear on both lists?” Well, Kim does, so Kim is one of my ideal clients. Kim is my niche. And then what you want to do after that is you want to say like—you know, you take all the ones that you circled here. So, let’s just for the sake of argument say that there’s more than one. Let’s put Derek on both sides too. Maybe Derek pays you money.

Chris Cooper (09:52):
It’s going to be really easy for you to identify that a lot of the people who light you up are also the same people who pay you money. Not because they pay you money, they just have that in common. And you’ll see why that’s important in a moment. So, then what you want to do is you want to say is, “Okay, what do Kim and Derek have in common?” and their commonalities are actually going to define your niche. Well, both are married, not to each other, but to other people. Both have professional jobs. You know, she’s an attorney; he’s a dental hygienist or something like that. So professional jobs. Both have kids—different ages, but they both have kids. Both have to commute to work. Okay? Et cetera. Both struggle with nutrition, both lack flexibility when they come in here. Both have a busier time of year at work.

Chris Cooper (10:39):
Whatever that is, you want to list those commonalities, and that is actually going to be your niche. Your niche is really the sum of these commonalities. Okay? That is the problem that you can solve better than anybody else in town. And that—focusing on that is what is going to make your gym great. Okay? So, in the next little span here, what I’m going to do is talk about the next thing that makes gyms great. When you’re moving your gym from good to great, one of the missing elements is discipline. And we’re not talking about the discipline of like working out really hard or getting up at 4 a.m. and taking a picture of your watch. Like Jocko, we’re talking about the discipline of working within a framework with freedom and responsibility. So, I’m going to break down exactly what that means for you here. So, Jocko Willink says that discipline equals freedom, and what he means really is consistency.

Chris Cooper (11:29):
If he’s going to work out every day at 4 a.m.—and if you follow him on Instagram, you’ll see the picture of his watch every day—it’s because that consistency actually creates freedom for the rest of his day. He doesn’t have to think about, “When am I going to work out tomorrow?” He knows at 4 a.m. is going to be a workout. Well, in your gym, discipline also equals freedom because consistency is more important than anything else. And I’m going to give you an example here. Let’s say that you are an amazing coach. Everybody loves coming to your classes. You are a 10 out of 10 coach. And then let’s say you can’t coach every class; you’ve got to hire somebody. And the night coach is—they mean well, but they’re a five out of 10. Soon, what happens is, people who come at night who’ve also experienced your coaching, they’ll say, “Hey, when are you coaching?”

Chris Cooper (12:15):
Or they’ll start to judge the nighttime class, like, “Ah, it’s not as good.” Your gym is only as good as its weakest link. And so, if you’ve got coaches on your bench who are a five out of 10, if you don’t answer the phone when it rings, if your gym is kind of clean, then that’s the level that you can rise to, right? You don’t rise to the level of your marketing; you fall to the level of your systems, and your systems are what give your gym consistency. So, consistency for me means freedom and responsibility within a framework. I’m going to show you exactly what that means right now. And in our blog today, I’ve got some instructions on exactly how to start building these frameworks. So, let’s say that we start off with like the perfect class. Think about your best class in the gym, and I want you to write down step by step what should happen.

Chris Cooper (13:01):
Okay? So, step one: It starts precisely on time. Step two: Maybe there’s like three minutes of banter, okay? Step three: It’s about a 12-minute warmup, okay? And then step four is you get out the equipment that you’re going to be using for the lift, okay? And step five is like 15 minutes of strength or skill. This just flows naturally to me because I’ve done it so many times. Your first time through it won’t be this easy, but basically what I’m showing you here is you’re giving your staff a framework. And if they’ve got a framework to follow, then you know that they’re going to deliver the ultimate outcome at the end, which is finish on time with happy people who love being there and have progressed toward their goal. Okay? On time, on goal, happy. Now what you haven’t done is given your staff a script.

Chris Cooper (13:58):
You haven’t said, like, “Okay, start your watch. Now read this. Here’s the cue card.” You know, you’ve given your staff a framework; they’ve got some freedom within that framework. You know, maybe they’re allowed to make up their own warmup if they want to. We used to do this; now we actually give them the warmup. But maybe you let them do that. The way that they teach the strength, you know, maybe that’s up to them. So that’s the freedom that’s allowed within the framework; however, the framework also comes with responsibility. And that responsibility is you will start on time, and you’ll start precisely on time, and you will spend 12 minutes on the warmup, right? And you will finish on time. And your responsibility is actually for finishing on time, for getting clients closer to the goals that they want, and finishing happy. Those are the three outcomes that you need.

Chris Cooper (14:48):
So, when you create this culture of discipline, what you’re actually creating here is guidelines, right? The framework and the responsibility to adhere to the framework. The next step though is to bring accountability in because responsibility is sometimes internalized by people and sometimes not. So, you have to create responsibility externally. And you do that by evaluating. So, in this example, the “perfect class” framework, what you would do is you would show up, and you’d have a stopwatch, and you would observe the class, and then you would rate the coach on a scale of like one to 10, where perfect completion of this framework is a 10 and a five gets you fired or whatever. Then what you would do is you would call a meeting one-on-one with this coach. We call that a career roadmap. You deliver this evaluation to them; say, “Here’s where you can improve.”

Chris Cooper (15:39):
And then you say, “Here’s what will happen if you do improve.” Okay? So, the second thing that great gyms have that good gyms don’t is they have this culture of discipline. It’s not just a matter of we want to get our level four certification; we all want to get our black belt. Like that’s personal discipline. Business discipline means that you’re operating with excellence consistently, and you’re only as excellent as your least consistent part. Now look, this is true for all of your ops. It’s not just the coaching. If you don’t respond to your leads who are texting you and asking you questions quickly, sorry, your gym is not great. If your sales office is dirty or you got stinky shoes in there, I’m sorry, you can’t become great. If your bathrooms are not clean on time, sorry. If you’re not evaluating your programming and updating it, I’m sorry, you won’t have a great gym until you do that.

Chris Cooper (16:29):
You have to be consistent in everything. Alright? The third thing that great gyms have that good gyms don’t is they focus on momentum. So, I wrote this book, “The Simple Six,” to talk about the power of incremental gains. Okay? Now, you might’ve heard this as like the 1% rule or something else, but basically the best gyms in the world, they don’t have like one specific marketing plan. Right? Like one six-week Facebook ads challenge is not going to make you the best gym in the world. What they do have is momentum. That means that they’re doing one thing every day to grow their business. I’m going to tell you how to do that, and also how this momentum thing works. Now in his book “Good to Great,” Jim Collins refers to pushing the flywheel. And in my book “The Simple Six,” I wanted to break that down and make it actionable by gym owners.

Chris Cooper (17:18):
So, I kind of drew the flywheel and what it means. Each little cog on the flywheel here—or you could call it a handle if you want—is one metric in your gym. These are the six key metrics that you have to track and improve in your gym to become great. That’s average revenue per member (ARM), length of engagement (LEG), effective hourly rate—you have to be doing valuable things with your time. Head is headcount—how many clients you have. ROI is the return that you’re getting on your investments, like in your space, your equipment, and your staff. And net owner benefit is how much the gym pays you. You have to be constantly improving all these things. And that is way more important than finding like the one magic bullet that’s going to fix everything for you, so let’s start off with a quick little exercise here.

Chris Cooper (18:03):
What I want you to do is just set a timer for two minutes, and I want you to think of all the ways that you can increase average revenue per member. Okay? So, here’s a hint, raise your prices, okay? But there’s other ways too. You can switch to biweekly billing. You can pass on credit card fees to the client. You can sell t-shirts; you can sell supplements. You can, you know, put more clients on personal training, whatever. Set up a timer for two minutes and build out your list. Okay? I’m going to pick biweekly billing for our example. Now—and again, there are so many things that we teach in Two-Brain that will help people boost their ARM. This is just a snapshot of our toolkit. It’s even been updated since here. Like I know that we’re missing a couple of really awesome upgrades right here.

Chris Cooper (18:48):
But you can do all this stuff to boost your ARM. The next step though is you’re going to focus on doing that action. Okay? So let me ask if this is you: You get up early, 5 a.m. You’re thinking about the gym; you’re listening to podcasts—maybe this one—on the way to the gym. You get to the gym, and by the time you look up again, it’s nine at night. You’ve been there for 16 hours. You head home, you’re listening to a podcast, you’re thinking about the gym. You spent an hour with your wife, and then you think, “Did my gym actually grow today?” And it didn’t. You were busy, but you didn’t actually grow the gym. And that happened to me for like 700 days in a row. The key to success and building momentum is at the end of the day, you got to be able to look back and say, “What was the one thing that I did today that actually grew my gym?”

Chris Cooper (19:36):
And just asking that question either will help you sleep, or it will prioritize what you need to do the next day. So, I’m going to tell you what you need to do the next day. You’re going to take this list that you’ve made for ARM, and you’re going to make a similar list for each of the metrics that I spelled out above, okay? Length of engagement is retention. EHR is like higher value work. Headcount is increasing the number of clients you have. ROI is auditing your expenses and improving them. Net owner benefit is paying yourself. And what you’re going to do now is map these out. So, for the next 30 days, you’re going to improve each of these metrics just a little bit. You’re going to build some momentum. You’re not going to make a giant leap; like you’re not going to double your rates or anything like that.

Chris Cooper (20:16):

The first thing that you’re going to do is look at ARM. Okay? So tomorrow, when you get up, before you do anything else, you’re going to pick one way to increase your ARM. So, I’m going to look at my list, and maybe I’ve got a dozen things on my list, but the easiest thing actually seems to be biweekly billing. Okay? I’m going to move my clients to biweekly billing, okay? So tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. when I get up, I make my coffee, I walk down to the basement, and I say, “How do I move to monthly billing or biweekly billing from monthly?” Well, you can do some research on the internet and figure it out. Our clients in Two-Brain have a step-by-step plan to do this, including a script to share with their clients. So, if you’re in Two-Brain, all you’ve got to do is copy that script, put it into your email, get it set to send out. Start with new clients if you want to and then move to everybody.

Chris Cooper (21:06):
Talk to your mentor about when to do it, et cetera, but this is a job that you can do, if not finished on Monday, you can have this finished by Tuesday, okay? And you’ve done one thing to grow your business that day. The next day—or as soon as you’ve finished this—you move on to your LEG tactic. And so, you might have like a whole bunch of things that improve retention listed, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Well, you’re going to pick the easiest, fastest one, and you’re going to say, “Okay, yeah, that’s the one that I’m going to do.” And you’re going to start working on that. And every morning, you’re going to work on that thing until it’s done. And then when that thing is done, you’re going to move on to your EHR tactic. How can I spend my time better? Maybe I could hire a cleaner.

Chris Cooper (21:48):
So, the next morning you’re going to start off by writing the checklist for a cleaner. Then you’re going to post a job ad for the cleaner. And again, like Two-Brain clients have all of this, but if you’re not in Two-Brain yet, you can create these things yourself—or sign up for Two-Brain and just get them. So then, you know, you’ve got like all these HER tasks, and “Okay, well it’s going to take me Thursday and Friday to write the cleaning checklist and then post a job ad.” Good. Don’t do anything else until that’s done. And then move on to head count. Okay? Now you’ve got a list of 12 ways that you can increase head count, pick the easiest, fastest way and just do that until it’s done. This is how you create momentum. And I’ll tell you something: The best gyms in the world—the gyms that go from good to great—they have long ago abandoned the idea that they’re going to find like one marketing silver bullet.

Chris Cooper (22:41):
And instead, they have embraced the concept of momentum. Every day, they do one thing to grow their business. Here’s the advice that I give most people. For me, I’m not great at context switching—it exhausts me. So, by the time I’m at the gym, it’s too late to do any work that’s going to grow that gym. What I have to do is get up, and I get up at 5:30, go downstairs with a cup of coffee, and I have 45 minutes before I have to leave the house. And that 45 minutes is spent doing one thing to grow my gym. That one thing might be a blog post, right? It might be like some of the examples I gave here: setting up biweekly billing, hiring a cleaner, or posting a job ad. But I’m going to do one thing because at the end of the day, when I look back and say, “What was the thing that I did that grew my business today?” aha, it was posting that job ad for the cleaner, or it was writing the cleaning checklist, or it was writing that one blog post with chat GPT, or whatever that was. If I can look back on the day and say, “I did one thing to grow my business today,” then I’ve got something really important:

Chris Cooper (23:43):
I’ve got momentum. And the top gyms in the world focus on momentum more than they do finding like the secret answer, reading 50 books every single year, listening to every podcast, you know, attending the webinar—they focus on momentum. That’s how I do it myself. So, I’m Chris Cooper. I’ve worked with over 2,000 gyms around the world. There are 900 currently in our mentorship practice—Two-Brain Business. We’ve produced over 43 millionaires now. And I promise you, the key to making these great gyms is not “I’m going to hire an ad agency,” right? The key is really what I’ve talked about in this show. It’s—you’ve got to have a couple things: You’ve got to have your niche, you’ve got to have discipline—the business discipline—and you’ve also got to have momentum, okay? Niche, discipline, momentum—that combination is absolutely unstoppable. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you want to hear more about this stuff, you can go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free Facebook group where you can share your tips and strategies for building momentum, discipline, and your niche, and you can hear from other people too. Thanks for your service.

The post How to Take Your Gym From Good to Great appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

From Good Gym to Great: The Hedgehog

Every gym owner wants to own a great gym.

Great gyms:

Get their clients the results they want.Create a “third place” their clients love to visit.Create careers for their staff.Pay their owners more than they’d make working for someone else.

After working with over 2,000 gym owners worldwide, we’ve learned that a gym can be great with 30 members or 3,000, with five staff members or 15, in a dingy warehouse or in a pristine storefront location.

Every gym is a little different. But every great gym has at least three things in common.

In this series, I’m going to break down three commonalities shared by great gyms. You can have a good gym without understanding these three concepts, but you can’t have a great one.

(These concepts are all broken down in greater detail by Jim Collins in his masterwork, “Good to Great.”)

First: Great Gyms Know Their Niche

Collins refers to this as “the hedgehog concept.”

Gyms that focus on a very specific niche are more likely to become great.

They can charge more per client (average revenue per member, or ARM).They get clients results faster than anyone else (they can be the best in their town at serving people in their niche).They keep clients longer (length of engagement, or LEG).They have less competitionThey care deeply about their specialty.

Here’s how to figure out your niche:

Grab a blank sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle.

On the left side of the line, write the names of the clients who pay you the most money every month. Shoot for your Top 10.

On the right side of the line, write the names of the clients who make you most excited to train. Again, shoot for your Top 10—but even your Top 5 will do.

Now circle the names that appear on both sides of the line.

Flip the paper over.

Write the names you circled at the top.

What do these people have in common?

Do they bring their spouses to the gym? Are they young? Old? Do they have kids? What do they earn per year? Are they all professionals? Do they work shifts?

Write down every commonality you can find. Treat it like a game: Make the longest list of things they have in common in five minutes.

You’ve just defined your niche. Focus on that.

Own Your Niche: An Example

Here’s niche domination in my town: A local phys.-ed. teacher makes an extra $40,000 per summer training hockey players out of his garage.

This works because:

He’s passionate about training hockey players.He’s the best trainer for hockey players in town.The best local hockey players come to his garage.The other hockey players follow the best. The hockey players love hanging out with each other.He can charge more for his training because of all of the above.

He’s also great because of some things he doesn’t do:

He doesn’t sell “open access” memberships to his garage.He doesn’t train the parents for fat loss.He doesn’t prioritize number of clients over high-ARM clients.He doesn’t even train baseball players.

His business is great because he knows his niche—the small subset of clients he can train better than anyone else. He’s a classic hedgehog.

In the next posts in this series, I’ll share two other strategies that will take your gym from good to great.

The post From Good Gym to Great: The Hedgehog appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Simple Secret to World-Class Gym Revenue (It’s Not Ads)

Huge revenue in gyms isn’t tied to advertising.

At least that’s what top gym owners often tell me.

I know—it sounds weird at first.

My own revenue record came in a month where we flooded Facebook with ads for a six-week challenge.

But when I talk to the world’s best gym owners, I rarely hear about giant advertising campaigns and crazy promotions.

I recently spoke with Eric Conner and Steve Ramsbottom. Both earned spots in the upper ranks of Two-Brain’s most recent monthly revenue ranking, which runs from US$50,000 to $93,000 per month.

Eric’s down in Southern California, not far from L.A. CrossFit Reform grosses over $50,000 a month, and Eric has increased revenue by 100 percent since 2016. In 2022-23, he added 20 percent to gross revenue.

Eric doesn’t run ads.

Steve’s gym, Performance Institute, is in B.C., Canada. Steve’s been in business for more than two decades. He’s worked with Paralympic medalists, pro sports teams and A-list celebs including Hugh Jackman, Jessica Alba, Zac Efron and Amanda Peet.

Steve didn’t mention crazy ad campaigns either.

So what are these gym owners doing?

The short summary:

They’re focusing on retaining high-value clients with A+ service, then getting referrals from those clients.

That’s the plan—and it works.

Operations Before Ads

I’m not down on advertising, and I’m not saying it doesn’t work.

Two-Brain teaches clients exactly how to use paid ads to grow a gym, and some of our clients use them to produce amazing results.

But I’m no longer surprised when gym owners with incredible metrics tell me they don’t prioritize advertising over client experience and referral campaigns.

Think about it:

Happy, high-value clients who get the results they want stay a long time and push a ton of revenue into a gym over a period of years.When they’re asked to, these happy clients bring friends, family members and co-workers to the gym.These new people are closely linked to long-term members who already love the gym, so they’re likely to stay for a long time, too.The new people often give the gym access to a fresh pool of referrals, and the cycle continues.

Here’s the other end of the spectrum (I’ve lived through this):

A gym owner tries to generate more revenue with an ad campaign.The ad campaign works, and people start pouring in.The gym owner is overwhelmed, service suffers, and existing members become irritated.The gym owner struggles to onboard and connect with the clients who signed up for the six-week challenge or transformation.Established clients start to leave because service has declined. Newer clients leave, too, because they’re moving on to another challenge or transformation.Revenue at the gym stays the same or drops.

I’ll give you the simplest revenue-generation plan I can offer. It’s based on mountains of data Two-Brain tracks, as well as conversations with elite gym owners who are dominating our revenue category. Here it is:

Dial in your operations so high-value clients get the results they want, then ask them to refer their friends.

Then, if you want to, feel free to run an ad campaign to find a few more perfect clients.

But if I were you, I wouldn’t prioritize advertising over asking every single happy client if they know anyone who needs your help, too.

The post The Simple Secret to World-Class Gym Revenue (It’s Not Ads) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Revenue Double-Up: How Eric Conner Did It Without Running Ads

Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Eric Conner’s gym near Los Angeles grosses more than $50,000 a month, and he’s increased gross revenue more than 100% since 2016. In 2022-2023, he added 20% to his revenue. He’s done all of this without running ads. He’s going to tell you how he accomplished all of it on this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym.” My name is Mike Warkentin; I’m your host. I’m asking you right now to hit “Subscribe” wherever you’re watching or listening. I literally have gym owners come on here, and they give away the cheat codes to running a profitable fitness business every month. You do not want to miss it. So hit “Subscribe” right now before you forget. Now, Eric, we’ve got some great stats to talk about. Welcome to “Run a Profitable Gym.”

Eric Conner (00:41):
Thanks, Mike. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Mike Warkentin (00:43):
I can’t wait to dig into this, so I’m just going to go right to it. You are grossing over $50,000 a month, U.S, in a really tough market. Los Angeles, California, San Diego: That whole area is saturated with gyms like yours—CrossFit gyms, functional fitness gyms. What is the number one reason you’re able to grow so much in that tough market?

Eric Conner (01:00):
That’s a great question, and it’s difficult to narrow it down to just one thing, but I guess the biggest thing I could say, looking from the outside perspective, would just be multiple different revenue streams. That would be the biggest one. But also, within that, really the mind shift of treating it like a business is really what has to happen.

Mike Warkentin (01:16):
Okay. So those are two huge ones. When I started my gym, I treated it like a hobby. The revenue looked like it was a hobby, and we only had one revenue stream. It was—guess what? Group training. That’s the common one for everybody. I didn’t realize there could be other revenue streams. When we started doing that—Two-Brain taught us how to treat it like a business and add revenue streams—things got better. So, we’re going to dig into your answers. I’m going to get into deep detail so that people know exactly how you generated this revenue. But first and foremost, give me the 411 on your business. What are you selling? What do you do? How much space do you have? Like give me the 60-second summary of what your business is all about.

Eric Conner (01:50):
Yeah, yeah, of course. So, we are—I am a CrossFit gym. We have a CrossFit gym. We’ve been open just over 10 years now. We have a 5,300-square-foot facility where we run group training, personal training, nutrition coaching, youth training. A majority of that is group training at the current moment. But we do have a breakdown of those different offerings. We have an onsite sports chiropractor who subleases two rooms from us, and he’s been involved with me since I helped open a CrossFit gym before ours. So, he’s been with me for about 13 years. And so, we have multiple offerings all over for all different levels of people and age ranges, demographics, and needs, to be fair.

Mike Warkentin (02:26):
Is your rent in that space pretty gnarly? I know that the real estate out there is pricey.

Eric Conner (02:31):
Yeah, that’s our biggest hurdle, to be fair. So, to be very honest, we just had another rent hike, which really happens every year, but a bigger one because of a new lease. And this next calendar year will be $200,000 of rent that we’ll pay in the whole year.

Mike Warkentin (02:47):
Whoa. So that’s, what are we looking at? I’m not good at math. Was that 15, 16,000 a month? Something like that?

Eric Conner (02:52):
Yeah, yeah. It’s just over 16. It’s about 16 and a half. And it’s going to kind of alter with different reconciliations, things of that sort.

Mike Warkentin (02:59):
Okay. And you’ve got some, I think—is it two full-time staff members who actually have a benefits plan and so forth? Is that correct?

Eric Conner (03:05):
I do currently, and I have one other one that’s actually growing in right now. So, we just literally kind of brought him on, and we’re filling his calendar as of as of right now. So, in the next month or so, he should be fully full-time.

Mike Warkentin (03:17):
Wow. So, you’re running—I mean this is like—it’s a small business, but it’s an actual business, and the reason I draw a distinction there is my business was a small business, but it was a small hobby to be really accurate. You’ve got a business that’s got like a huge rent commitment. You’ve got staff members; these are people who are building careers, and they’ve got retirement plans and benefits and so forth. And you are running this thing as a CEO. I know you also are getting into real estate investing on the side at the Tinker level, which is our upper-level gym owners. You’ve got a ton of stuff going on, but you’ve got a real live business here generating tons of revenue and thriving and paying you a lot of money, which you deserve for being the owner.

Mike Warkentin (03:50):
So, I want to dig into that, and I want to help you help listeners figure out how they can do this too. So, 2016: You increased revenue—you said a 100%. And ARM increased—I think it was, the stats I looked at ahead of time were like 50% ARM increase. PT revenue increased like 500%. What are the steps that you did to start making these improvements? Like what were the first things you did to start formalizing from being a hobby or, you know, not professional to a professional real business that thrives?

Eric Conner (04:17):

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of steps there. I would say the first and foremost—kind of like I brought up in an answer before—is really it was a mindset shift first and foremost, and that was the biggest, biggest thing. Then it’s just literally putting the feet to the floor of learning how to apply everything to get there.

Mike Warkentin (04:32):

What caused the mindset shift? Like what caused that? What made you just flip the switch?

Eric Conner (04:36):
So, to be fair, in 2017 is when my son came. So we were working to get pregnant, trying to have children. I already have two step kids as well, but we were trying to have some of our own as well together—me and my wife. And I knew that if I really wanted to keep the gym, I’d have to really buckle down and make it a real business. We were coming up on our first lease renewal at that time as well. And then, so I knew that that was going to be a big hurdle because it’s always going up really, and it’s not going to get any cheaper out here. So, it was really kind of like a “crap or get off the pot” type thing, where we had to just buckle down. That was—and to be fair, in 2016 was when I started following Chris Cooper and a lot of his ways. I tried to do it on my own for a couple years and really realized I didn’t know what steps to take at what times anymore. And that was really when I started up—when I got myself a mentor. I started with Coop; I did my intro call with Coop and everything, and it was amazing. Yeah, I never looked back from there.

Mike Warkentin (05:35):
So, 2016: Real life comes calling, and you realize you can’t play with housemen anymore. You got kids coming in the whole thing, and you’ve got to start buckling down in a big rent environment. You start following Two-Brain; you start picking up all the free stuff we give out and then realize, “I’d like to go further faster.” So, you call Chris himself who was still doing those intro calls at the time, and you start taking action. So, like what were some of the first steps? Because the thing we pride ourselves in mentorship—and you are now a Two-Brain mentor, I should tell our listeners—is telling gym owners what to do when. The exact right one thing to do right now to grow your business. Then the next thing. What did Coop tell you to do, and what kind of steps did you take to start making these changes?

Eric Conner (06:13):
Yeah, that was—I mean, Coop really was the one that got me started on. Then “here’s your mentor.” My mentor at the time was Josh Price, who’s an amazing, amazing person and a part of my journey and growth. But really it was just buckling down. It was learning. It was—a lot of things that really helped us was what we consider in the Two-Brain world, the “prescriptive model” and really understanding that. And so, like the intake process was before—and it’s very common I feel like in a lot of our gyms, is that we kind of project what we think people want or what they’ll pay for, right? And so, understanding that not everybody wants group training. Not everybody’s okay with that. Not everybody’s as comfy as we are coming into a group or with fitness or anything like that. And so, learning how to sit down, talk to people, really get to know them, and really help recommend the right thing for them was profound in our growth and development of the business.

Mike Warkentin (07:01):
Listeners, the prescriptive model—very simple summary—is you sit down with a prospective client, you get them to tell you what they want to accomplish. You tell them the exact fastest, best plan to accomplish that, and you tell them the price, and they’ll probably say yes. And if they don’t, you maybe drop an option and say, “Okay, maybe we don’t do nutrition coaching and personal training. Maybe we just do personal training to start. How does that price sound? Good? Let’s go.” And you do that kind of thing. In the model, group training is not your first option, which I thought it was for me. I tried to sell just group training at $150 a month. I should have started with personal training because some of my clients wanted that more, and I didn’t know it because I didn’t ask the question. The prescriptive model, when you implement it, will raise your revenue. We know this because of the data that we’ve collected. It raises revenue and improves retention. So that’s my question Eric: When you started doing this, did you automatically start seeing average revenue per member (ARM) increase and retention get better?

Eric Conner (07:56):
Significantly. Yep. Yep. We significantly did. We saw about a 25% boost immediately in both.

Mike Warkentin (08:02):
Right away? Hey, wow. So again, listeners, we talked about the cheat coats, gym ownership. If you’re listing right now, the prescriptive model, if you start doing this with new clients, you can expect a revenue jump. Eric saw 25, other people see 30, and it just gets better and better. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the article that will tell you exactly how to use that. Talk to me a little bit about some of the other steps. So prescriptive model is a huge one, and it’s honestly not that hard to do. You just have to commit, practice, and then do it regularly. What else did you do?

Eric Conner (08:31):
So, back in 2018—so, essentially, I grew my leadership skills, which is a big thing for me. You know, so we had some staff, but I wasn’t really fully prepared to lead them well, to be very completely honest. You start to learn, too, which people are the right fit currently and which might be the right fit long term. And there’s nothing really wrong with that either way, to be fair. But it helped me learn how to lead my team as well. Because once you get big enough—which we weren’t huge, but we weren’t small at the time—was like a lot of them were delivering our product as well. Then, how do I delegate it correctly to them? How do I show them what I need and want? Are they the right people in the right seat? So, a lot of it was learning that for the first couple years—placing people correctly, fitting it in right, and setting ourselves up for growth. And then with me, along with that, is me growing up what they call like the “value ladder.” So not me doing the cleaning as often, as I can get someone else to do that to open up my time to help grow the business and lead our team.

Mike Warkentin (09:28):
The value ladder, listeners—the simple summary of that is you make a list of every single job that you do in your gym. You put a price tag beside each one, and you take the lowest one on the ladder. It’s usually cleaning, but it can be something else. And you say, “If I offload this four-hour-a-week cleaning job for $60, can I make more than $60 in the four hours that I would’ve spent on cleaning?” You do that, and you keep doing it all the way up the ladder until you’re the CEO. Eric is doing this interview at home because he can’t be at his gym because it’s freaking crazy there right now. So, he actually had to find space somewhere else that’s quiet because his gym is thriving, and he’s not there. He’s talking to me; I’m taking up his time, but his gym is still operating in the background, which is what a Tinker-level gym owner—that’s our upper-level gym owners—can do. They’re still making money while they’re yakking with me. So, you can learn how to do that in our Tinker program. I think it was 500%, the stat was, that you increased PT, so that’s going to be a huge, huge boost to your ARM. But was it just as simple as just starting to offer PT in your prescriptive model? No Sweat Intros?

Eric Conner (10:27):
To an extent, yeah. So, we didn’t—again, we assumed at the time everybody wanted a group. So, we had some personal training that would go into group—not many and not priced correctly and all that kind of stuff—so we were starting that foundation. We had that awareness there. And really, I had one personal training client prior to understanding the whole Two-Brain method, and he had not attended ever any group classes. And then he came to me, and was like, “Do you guys offer personal training?” I was like, “Sure.” Right. And so, we brought him on. Little did I know that later, once I learned all the Two-Brain ways and kind of like looking into it, was a lot of these people don’t thrive in group trainings.

Eric Conner (11:04):
They won’t attend; they need accountability. They don’t want to do exactly what a group’s doing—all these kinds of things. And then so once we learned how to, then yes. In our No Sweat Intro—our intro when we meet the people and talk to them—we literally say, “Would you prefer training in a group or one-on-one training with someone or training in a group?” And then that helped—that question changed our whole landscape because half of the people I thought that would like group were like, “Well, I prefer one-on-one.” Or maybe it starts with a one-on-one for a lot longer. And that just completely changed how our PT offerings went.

Mike Warkentin (11:36):
I think you said it almost word for word the way Chris has written about it. And it’s just saying to a client, “Would you feel more comfortable training in a group or one-on-one with me?” And if the answer is one-on-one in a group, that is a high value client who’s going to pay not $150 for a group membership, probably $70 to $90 for a PT session or whatever your prices are. I recommend higher than $40; I’ll put it that way. It’s incredible. And just saying that, Eric, when you started saying that—the first time you said it, did it make you feel squidgy as you sat there?

Eric Conner (12:04):
Yeah, yeah. Completely. You know, you feel a little funny, right? You’re a little nervous; you’re a little skeptical if people are going to even buy what you’re—not even selling; you’re really just trying to help really is what this is. It’s not really even a sale. It’s a sales process, but it’s really not because you know you can help them, and we’re asking them, “What will help you best with how you are?” So once a few of them are just like, “Yeah, I’d really prefer individual training.” And stuff like that. And we were like, “Alright, we’ve got it. Here, let’s do it this way.” And, and then people, those people—like we were talking about with length of engagement and revenue per average revenue per member goes up. But our personal training clients are our best length of engagement. Those people stay. There’s so much high touch point; there’s so much accountability for them. There’s results, and they’re there because they’re paying for a lot of that to help them fast track where they need to go.

Mike Warkentin (12:54):
When a client says, “I would prefer this service,” it doesn’t feel as difficult to close a sale, right? Because you’re not ramming something on them that they don’t want. They’ve literally told you, “I want this high value service.” You’re like, “Okay, credit card.” You know, and it’s an easy deal. Whereas for me, I was like, “Oh, I’m assuming they want group training,” so I’m just going to, “Oh, do you want to do personal training?” And then I feel horrible about it. Many of them wanted that. When I started telling our clients “We offer personal training,” our group clients, they were like, “Really? I could get help with double-unders?” I’m like, “Yes, you can.” It was mind blowing and groundbreaking for everything. And revenue changed dramatically. So, listeners, couple of things right off the bat here: We’ve got prescriptive model—that’s asking people what they want and then telling them the solution to their problems. Got leveling up as a leader—that’s a big concept we’ve dealt with in other shows. I won’t dwell on it here, but you will have to do that as an upper-level gym owner. And then the other one is revenue streams—different stuff, offering different things. So, Eric, you mentioned a couple things that you’ve got going on there, give me like a little bit more info. You’ve got PT, group, nutrition coaching. I’m guessing you have kids’ programs. Like what other revenue streams contribute to this giant number that you’ve got?

Eric Conner (13:58):
Yeah, so 70% of our revenue right now is through group training—adult group training. We have eight to 10 classes a day. So, we do have a good amount of classes per day. So that’s a big part of it. And we tend to facilitate that well. We do a good job at a class for about eight to 15 people on average. So that’s definitely our natural bread and butter. Our personal training is about 20% of our revenue currently on average. So that’s some one-on-ones for the On-Ramps. We have different On-Ramp tiers for people to kind of move through those. And that’s one of those long-term personal training clients as well. And then we have nutrition coaching, which is not one of our higher revenue streams by any means right now. That’s our biggest opportunity for sure.

Eric Conner (14:41):
We do a great job with it. We have an amazing nutrition coach. It’s just marketing it correctly or communicating it as well as possible. So, we’re working to improve that immediately. And our youth training—we do a good job with youth training. We’ve always had a solid youth program. I personally have always loved youth training. I used to coach it in the past but just can’t anymore. And then we’re in a very family-oriented demographic in the suburbs that we live in. So, no one else is really doing this type of training. That is a huge opportunity for us. The biggest limitation we have currently is our space for that. So sometimes they have to go on at the same time as adult classes, but we have a pretty consistent youth training, which is about one to 2% also consistently across the board.

Mike Warkentin (15:22):
Hey, and that’s interesting because Chris has often said, “Don’t do all the things. Do a few things really, really well.” You need maybe three, maybe four revenue streams, something like that. You don’t need 20, right? Like 20 is probably where you start spinning plates and things fall down. But like Chris has exact models for like three solid revenue streams, and it’s usually like group PT and nutrition coaching or maybe kids or something like that. But you can put all that stuff together, which you’ve obviously done, and you’ve seen some opportunities there. For example, nutrition coaching—the best part about it: It doesn’t require a ton of space in the extra costly California market, right? So, you could—like your nutrition office—just put more people through that 100 square feet or whatever, right?

Eric Conner (15:59):
Yeah. Completely. Even Zoom calls—those have gone really well for our nutrition coach. She also has side nutrition coaching from a whole other digital business. So yeah, it really doesn’t take up much space, but it’s a significant low hanging fruit—no pun intended, really—to get people the best result quickly.

Mike Warkentin (16:15):
It would be better for you to maximize out there three revenue streams and make them really strong than to try and get 10 going that are all struggling. Right? Focus on—nurture them, right. Eric is living proof of that. I want to ask you specifically about 2022-2023: You added about 20%. And this is after like years of mentorship and a lot of work. As an experienced gym owner, how did you get such a sizable bump in revenue in that period?

Eric Conner (16:39):
You know, that’s really funny. That’s partially also what was in my head, to be fair. What I’ve learned is that I work better under pressure. So, for example, like we talk about the rent being high, having a kid coming, all those kinds of things, right? When I start to have pressure points, that’s when I push. I don’t get—I can get more comfortable at times, and that’s why I am in the Tinker program because Jeff Smith pushes me like crazy and being around the other people—

Mike Warkentin (17:07):
Jeff does that? Sounds weird.

Eric Conner (17:09):
Yeah. Yeah. He’s quite good at it, and he’s exactly what I need. And so really what had helped me with that was I knew that we were at like a pivoting point of where, you know, if we really want to buckle down, if I really want to have this business forever—which I absolutely love what I do. I look forward to waking up and doing what I do. We change lives on the daily. I love our team. Like if I really want to keep doing this, we need to make it sustainable. We need to make it. So, I was realizing with our cost going up again, and all these kinds of things, that in January when we were at our last Tinker meetup, I was like: You know, at the end of the day, we just need to make more.

Eric Conner (17:44):
I can complain about high rent all I want, whatever it is. I absolutely love our payroll pie because it gets our team taken care of, but we still got to cover it. And at the end of the day, I’m like: We just need to make more. We have so many opportunities. So, one thing I realized—I noticed that we were understaffed for growth. So, if we had got five more new personal training clients, a couple of those would need to go to me. And then I get pulled back too much. I still coach some, but in my own head I was still the one that helped fill in, and I needed to start to shift that. We needed to grow the team a little bit more to be able to have the infrastructure to be able to grow. And so, we brought on another team member, and I started delegating a few other tasks with my leadership team—essentially my head coach and my office manager. And we started working all of those components together. And since then, we’ve seen sizable growth and consistency and growth as well.

Mike Warkentin (18:39):
So would it be correct in saying that, you know, some form of accountability is kind of what motivates you to take action?

Eric Conner (18:44):
Yeah, completely. Whether it’s back against the wall of some sort or it’s anything else of that manner. Yeah, it’s—sometimes it can be financial; sometimes it can be other life stresses that may be coming on. But yeah, whatever shifts my mind to be able to be like, “Okay, I need to take time, buckle down, figure out where we’re going to grow and how we’re going to grow. Set us up for that checks and balances as we go along, and then we keep analyzing it and moving forward from there.”

Mike Warkentin (19:10):
So have you found that a mentor is the thing that provides that for you? And, obviously when you have financial stuff, like when you have a kid coming, that’s the motivation, but have you found that a mentor will keep you honest along the way in other places when you might have a tendency to be complacent?

Eric Conner (19:23):
Yeah, completely. I think the hardest part for me before having a mentor was I thought that they were all going to be like hard-nosed, head down, like never—almost like cutthroat-type idea and just worried about sales. And really, it’s almost like the people that have been through that same experience or know others that have been through the experience and can help give perspective and outside awareness to what’s going on and solutions to that. So that has helped me like crazy because it’s kind of like with us with our clients—kind of like therapists to an extent, right? Sometimes you can talk about the stresses going on and all those kinds of things, but then help provide a neutral perspective as to how to move it forward correctly.

Mike Warkentin (20:05):
And as a mentor yourself now, that’s something you can certainly offer to clients. And all our mentors—I think it’s like 50 or 60 now, scattered around the world—they have different styles. There are some that are a little more direct; there are some that are a little more coaxing—everything in between. And the idea is to get you to see the thing that you need to do right now to grow your business. If that’s something you’re interested in, book a call—link is in the show notes—and you can talk to someone about exactly how a mentor can help you grow your business. Now I want to ask you this: You are not running ads yet. Your business has been growing by astronomical numbers. So where are you acquiring it? How are you getting these high value clients into your gym without ads?

Eric Conner (20:38):
Yeah, that’s a really good question. To be fair, we haven’t done it because we’re stubborn. We just really—I had never learned it before, and it wasn’t the thing that was fully needed yet. We are setting ourselves up to be able to utilize them correctly. But about 50% of our people come from affinity marketing, which is essentially from our closest people in the gym: friends, family, referrals from within. So, we’ve been in our same spot in our location and our city for just over 10 years, like I said. So, we do have a sound reputation. We’re known generally, or we’re fairly a small city for our area; we have about 150,000 people. So, we tend to know people. We’ve probably interacted with someone’s parents, or their kid, or their spouses, or their cousin, or something like that.

Eric Conner (21:21):
There’s a bit of word of mouth in some of that, and people that have had positive experiences in our place, whether they can stay or not. The other is really 50% come from the outside—a few walk-ins, not a lot. We are a retail space area to an extent, but it’s not a lot of walk-ins. A lot of it is just inquiries via our website, which is a GLM website and other trackings there. So, people may be searching for local CrossFit gyms in that manner, but we’re working on tracking that even better for us.

Mike Warkentin (21:48):
So a benefit for you is that you’ve got 10 years of history in an area, and you’ve obviously established a really great reputation in the community, which is fantastic, but let’s not forget that like in that California community there are dozens and dozens and dozens of gyms. I’ve seen maps where they’re just clustered like seven within five blocks and things like that. Like it’s insane, so even just having—you know, you’ve got change of reputation, but you had to build that up, and you had to find a way to stand out from the crowd. So that’s something you’ve definitely done. You mentioned affinity marketing. That is not a passive process, listeners. That’s not where you just like sit back, and you’re like, “Ah, my clients will refer their friends.” Doesn’t happen like that. It is an actual program where you are encouraging people to bring in their friends and partners. So, what’s some of the things that you’ve done through affinity marketing that have really moved the needle? Because some listeners will say, “Oh, referrals will just happen.” What have you done to make them happen?

Eric Conner (22:34):
Really, it’s via conversation. I’m naturally very—I’m very good with conversation. I’m very good with the relationships. That’s just one thing I enjoy. It’s natural to me. And it’s not just me that’s running this; obviously my team is running this as well, but we’ve always done—which is not a huge one—but we’ve always done before a “Bring a Friend” day once a month.

Eric Conner (22:52):
We changed that more recently, and we’ve seen good effects to a “Bring a Friend” week once a quarter. It makes it a little bit more—they can understand kind of our people and get to know our people more than just one day. We had some referrals that would come from that, but not as many as we needed. And then we do athlete check-ins. Some people call them goal reviews. We do those with our people formally where we do ask, “Is there anybody else that we can help?” But also, we do those fairly naturally as well just in the class before or after class being around. Part of my role at times is to be just floating around the gym floor before and after classes just to talk to our people. It helps retain them. I enjoy the people, and we also can—it opens up the conversations to them being like, “Oh, hey, my friend’s been kind of struggling with this.” “We’d be happy to chat with them. We’ll see if we can help in some way, whether it’s their training here; we give them tips for themselves, whatever that is.” So, it’s really just opening up conversation, but it’s also being aware of kind of what things are coming in in that conversation. Are they talking about a friend? Are they talking about a spouse? And then, what steps can I do to help connect with those people to help them get where they want to go or see if we can be the ones to help them there?

Mike Warkentin (23:58):
One of the best places to have these conversations is in a goal review session, which you mentioned; you call them athlete check-ins. Do these quarterly with your clients. If you do, you will sell more stuff guaranteed. I think the upgrade rate is something like 34% of people upgrade by about 30%. It’s something like that because they don’t know about the services you’re offering, and you can tell them more stuff, change the prescriptions, make things better, solve problems, and you’ll retain more members. But in those conversations, there’s actual playbooks that Two-Brain has to tell you exactly how to ask, “Who else can I help?” And this is not like a pushy kind of slimy thing. It’s like, “Oh man, your partner is super stressed, and I know it’s affecting you. Is there any way that we could help your partner?”

Mike Warkentin (24:37):
And they say, “Well, yeah, you know, what if we did two-on-one personal training? What if we tried that?” There are scripts for this. We actually lay it out where you can, beforehand, lay out the parts of your client’s life. Who do they work with? Who do they live with? Who do they hang out with? What are they doing in their spare time? Start making these lists. There’s an actual chart that Chris Cooper has created. You start looking at it when these things pop up in the goal review sessions; it’s just a natural thing where you’re saying, “Oh man, the people on your hockey team are all just like struggling with their conditioning. What if we ran a program for them for six weeks to get them into shape?” It’s easy stuff like that. If you start doing this stuff, things will happen. It’s not a passive process, and you’re growing your gym. High value clients. Eric, when your high value clients bring in a friend, probably a high value client is going to stay. Am I wrong?

Eric Conner (25:22):
Yeah, it’s very likely.

Mike Warkentin (25:24):
Yeah, it’s a win. It’s a huge win across the board. So, I’m not going to keep you for much longer, but I want to ask you this: You’re now a mentor, so congratulations on that. We’ve talked about some different stuff here. What can a listener do? And again, you don’t know the exact circumstance, but what are some things that a lister can do tomorrow morning to start generating more revenue? What are like two things that you would give them to think about and try?

Eric Conner (25:45):
That’s a good question. The biggest thing that I would say is if you’ve been in business at all for a little bit—a short period of time or long period time, whatever it is. I contact five to 10 former members a day—depends on how many you’ve lost. You know, these are people that you’ve had relationships with before. They obviously—ideally positive relationships is the important one there. But they are people that have bought from you before but also had relationships with you before life changes—for the bad, for the good, right? So sometimes they leave because X, Y, or Z, but they may want to come back, and they’ve been looking to come back, or they need more help, or you have a new service offering that can actually help them now that you couldn’t before.

Eric Conner (26:24):
So reaching back out to these old people, even just to have open conversations with them. I think the biggest thing is having more conversations to be fair—strategic ones. But if you’re genuine, and you actually care, and you reach out from not just a salesy perspective, but actually caring about these people, they’ll open up to you, and they will let you know if they need help. And you can ask if there’s anyone else you need to help. So easy answer to that. Contact five to 10 people. I’d say five people a day if that makes it easier. But if you can bulk them all at once, that’s great. So, you can get 15 calls or 15 texts or whatever it is. And if you get a few responses, then get a few responses. The other—

Mike Warkentin (27:01):
I’m going to stop you there, and I’m just going to tell you one thing, listeners. What should you say when you contact these people? Here it is: “How are you doing?” Send. Try. And then take the conversation from there because you’re a great person; you know how to interact with people. What’s your second thing, Eric?

Eric Conner (27:13):
Yeah, I was going to say, sometimes we call it like a “5130 post,” which is essentially just being very active, being aware of saying, “Hey, I’m looking for five busy moms who are looking to lose weight the next 30 days,” or whatever timeframe it is, right. Whatever kind of people you can help best. And the more clear and straightforward you can speak to these people, the more they can see themselves there. And then it just opens conversations again. So, to be fair, that’s just starting a conversation, but it’s where you take the conversation. So, if you can just kind of get a few of those framings of how I can help people and know that you can and be confident you can, there’s no—the sky’s the limit as to how you can grow.

Mike Warkentin (27:50):
I need X people to do one thing over X period. Five people, lose weight, 30 days. 5130—whatever you want to call it like that. I’ve seen gym owners put these posts up, and I’ve seen the reports behind the scenes when they see what happened. They win every time. Put it up, see what happens. When people comment, message them, and start a conversation. You’ll probably sell something, and you can do this stuff for free. It doesn’t take anything but about two minutes on social media. Eric, thank you so much for offering those two steps. Congrats again on being a mentor and on the incredible stuff that you’ve done with your gym. Really appreciate your time for sharing everything with our audience here on “Run a Profitable Gym.”

Eric Conner (28:26):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate it.

Mike Warkentin (28:28):
We will check in with you again to see if you can double your revenue yet again. That was revenue leader, Eric Conner. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and I’m your host Mike Warkentin. And thank you so much for listening. Again, cheat codes for gym ownership come out every month on the show. Please hit “Subscribe” wherever you are watching or listening. And now, here’s Chris Cooper with a final word.

Chris Cooper (28:46):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper, with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.

The post Revenue Double-Up: How Eric Conner Did It Without Running Ads appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

What if You Had High Revenue and Low Expenses?

Huge revenue, tiny expenses—that’s how you build an amazing gym.

But in the service business, we depend on people, and we want to reward and retain amazing staff members. So how do you balance the need for profitability with the need to take care of your people?

I’ll tell you—but first, here’s our September 2023 revenue leaderboard one more time:

With those numbers in mind, here’s a big question: How much better are they if these owners are minimizing expenses and getting huge ROI on the money they do spend?

If you look at your ratio of revenue to expenses, you might find some places where you can improve your profit margin—and you don’t always have to make cuts. In fact, you might discover that some reasonable investments generate huge rewards for you and your staff members.

Example 1

This one is simple. Maybe you have two music subscriptions but only use one service. Cut the other and your profit margin goes up.

Example 2

What if you messaged your accountant and said, “How can I make better use of your service?” Maybe the accountant responds with this: “If you get your monthly documents to me on the 15th every month instead of making me chase you until the 30th, you’ll only pay me for accounting, not hounding you.” Here, you’re not cutting anything; you’re just improving a process so you spend less.

Example 3

What if you audited your facility and asked “where am I wasting space?” Maybe that room full of broken bumper plates and unused fitness machines can be cleared to make space for a small PT studio. In this example, you’re getting better ROI on your space, and you’re creating a place where your coaches can earn more money personally and bring more cash into the business.

High-Revenue, Low-Expense Gyms

When I review our revenue leaders, I always ask questions like this:

Who’s doing the most with the least? Who can stretch a small space or low headcount the furthest? Who’s crushing it in a tiny space or getting amazing ROI on expenses in a larger gym?

Here’s what high-revenue, lower-expense gyms have in common:

They all started small and upgraded space later—or the owner started in a larger space but subleased a portion to cut expenses until the gym could afford to use all the space.They have good locations but none are paying retail-area rent.They have some revenue diversity, with 10-20 percent of revenue coming from personal training, nutrition coaching or some kind of specialty program.All spend time coaching or mentoring staff.All give their staff members opportunities to grow the pie for everyone (intrapreneurship).All are either in the Tinker Phase of entrepreneurship or just about to make that leap.All are either in our Top 10 for net owner benefit (how much they pay themselves) or very close.

What can you learn from the people with high revenue and low overhead?

That the combination is possible.

You don’t absolutely need a 30-station rig or 25,000 square feet of space or many of the “toys” you want to buy. Those things don’t attract clients, and they won’t make you more successful.

Grow after you’re successful instead of building and hoping.

Finally, don’t starve yourself by giving your staff a bigger slice of a small pie. Teach your staff how to grow the pie for everyone.

The post What if You Had High Revenue and Low Expenses? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Add $5,000 to Your Gym’s Revenue Fast

So you want to generate more revenue at your gym.

I get it.

In the previous post in this series, I told you how the best gym owners in the world take in more than $50,000 a month.

Here’s our September leaderboard one more time:

So how can you start moving in the right direction today?

Let’s start by adding about $5,000 in revenue to your annual total, and let’s do it before 2024 arrives.

I have an exact plan to help you do it.

My new guide is now available, and it contains five quick wins that will put money in your bank account. These are simple, tried-and-tested tactics that don’t create a lot of work for you.

To get the guide, click on the image below and follow the instructions on the post in our Gym Owners United group. (If you aren’t a member of that group yet, click here to join, and then click the image to request the guide.)

Not convinced? I understand—I’m a skeptic, too.

To see a preview of the guide and the tactics, check out this video:

The post How to Add $5,000 to Your Gym’s Revenue Fast appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Big, Sexy Gym Metrics: Our Revenue Leaderboard

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Which gyms do the most revenue per month? I’m Chris Cooper, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And this is the leaderboard show—my favorite show of the whole month because I get to talk about the gyms who are doing the best in one of six different categories that we track religiously. This month, I’m talking about the gyms in Two-Brain who are doing the most revenue. Now, this is a big, sexy metric that a lot of people want to talk about, right? The revenue number is like the bench press of the Globo Gym. Everybody wants to know what’s your bench. Well, today, we’re going to talk about the proven numbers and how these gym owners got there because not only are these gyms absolutely crushing it in revenue, but they are owned by generous people who want to share their top tactics with you. And a lot of this stuff is things maybe you’ve never thought of before.

Chris Cooper (00:49):
So first, let’s go into the list, and let’s talk about who is in the top 10 this month. So first, in 10th place, and this is all in American dollars, USD. We have gyms around the world that you’re going to hear about who are represented here, but we transfer everything in USD so that you’re comparing apples to apples, okay? So first off, a gym from the U.S. in 10th place is doing $49,487 per month. Now look, guys, I’ve got to tell you something else here. This is not just like they had their biggest month of their life, and that’s it. We actually look at their previous month. So we want a rolling three-month average because what can happen—and a lot of gurus actually do this to fool you—is they’ll sell like one massive six-week challenge or something, or they’ll store up all their dividends for the whole year, and they’ll take it in one month and then report that as like, “Here’s how much money I did last month.”

Chris Cooper (01:43):
And we’re supposed to think like, “Oh, that’s what they do every month,” right? And then they’ll even sometimes do worse. They’ll multiply that by 12, and say like, “We have projected this much in earnings.” That’s all BS. You and I know it. This is like their rolling three-month average revenue. And we looked at it in September of 2023, and we said, “Okay, we want to share who’s doing the most, and how are they doing it?” We’re all about objective proof here. So, first gym: $49,487 last month. They’re in the States, and if I were them, I would not be sleeping well because 513 more dollars would put them to a $50,000 monthly average in revenue. Good for them. Congratulations. They know what their next step is going to be. Right. Next, in ninth place is a CrossFit gym, and they did $50,277 in revenue last month. So awesome—great top line guys. And I want to dig in. I want to see what that bottom line is, but like 50,000 bucks—crossing that threshold feels amazing. I remember the first time we did it; we jumped from like 46 to 52 for the first time ever. And I was just over the moon. Like I could not believe that a micro-gym could do that much money. And I felt great because I knew what my profit margin was.

Chris Cooper (03:00):
And at that point it was like over 50%. I knew that my coaches were able to make a great amount of money. That’s like a watershed moment for a lot of gyms. So, congratulations. Like you’ve proven that your business is viable, and you’ve got something to be proud of. Keep going; keep doing the things that you’re already doing. Up next: These guys are from Chile. I love them so much. In U.S. dollars, last month, they did $51,403 in revenue. So awesome. You’re really making a difference by serving so many people in that country. And you know, the CrossFit affiliates out there should really be proud of you too, like I am. In seventh place, from Germany, $51,662 U.S. from last month. And man, there’s some great tips from this gym that I think are going to be new to a lot of listeners.

Chris Cooper (03:48):
So stay tuned for those. Sixth place: This gym is on our leaderboard and has been for years and years and years, and they just keep crushing it. $53,274 in revenue last month, like rolling three average. So great. I know that like these are full-time career staff working at this gym. Full-time, career owner, longtime CrossFit affiliate. He loves to get other CrossFit affiliates together in his neck of the woods too. I’ve even hosted seminars at this gym and I just—I love it. This is really like proof of the longevity that you can have when you have the right systems and the right people working those systems, charging the right rates, bringing people in, and keeping people around long term and actually changing their lives. So, thanks for that. Thanks for your leadership. The next one is actually a CrossFit gym too. And so, this gym narrowly beat out the previous gym at $53,502.

Chris Cooper (04:44):
Beat them by under 250 bucks, like 227—$8. These guys are both in Tinker. I know there’s going to be a little rivalry now. I love it so much. And both of these guys will probably come back next time. We report revenue numbers publicly with even higher numbers because that’s what Tinker’s all about, right? Helping each other climb that ladder. So, congratulations to them. Now, those were the top performing CrossFit gyms. So, there’s still four more to go, but in number five: 53,502. And number six: 53,274. Amazing. Now, let’s keep going up. In fourth place is a gym from Belgium; they did $58,156 USD in revenue. This next gym is in Denmark and in U.S. dollars, last month, they did $62,434. Congratulations. You know, it’s not a CrossFit gym, but as the movement of constantly-varied, functional movement grows worldwide, I love to see European countries on the leaderboard; I love to see Asian countries on the leaderboard.

Chris Cooper (05:41):
This is so great. And the best part is these are all Two-Brain gyms. So, you know, it’s not just like they got a big bench press, but they can’t walk up the stairs. These guys have good revenue, and they also have great profits. They have great retention, they have very high ARM, and most importantly, they’re changing all these people’s lives. So, guys, thank you for your service. Congratulations, Denmark. But I’m so excited to get to number two because it’s from Canada, a Canadian box: $62,435. That’s U.S. dollars last month, which is, you know, probably around 90 grand Canadian. Congratulations. This is more of a sports performance training type gym, and they’re absolutely crushing it, changing lives out there and doing really, really well in a Canadian economy that I know is tough. Just, you know, for background, like 65% of the gyms in Canada have not recovered even 90% of their revenue post-COVID.

Chris Cooper (06:37):
And here these guys are close to the top of our leaderboard and crushing it. Congratulations. The number one gym that we want to report on is also a sports-specific gym. They did, over the last three months, average per month of $93,516 U.S. So, congratulations. These guys are down in a southern state. They’ve got some great tips for you that I’m going to share right now on how to get to that level. And these tips are going to be brand new to a lot of you. You know, every month I talk about revenue, and I talk about like the math of ARM times client head count. And like these gyms who are out there with 500 clients still might not have great revenue because their average revenue per member sucks. They might not have great retention. This gym is all of that. They have the complete package. They have high ARM; they have a ton of clients.

Chris Cooper (07:25):
They have really amazing retention, right? And they’re a sports-performance gym. So, let’s get into the comments from some of our top performers. Some of these people have been on these leaderboards for years. Some of these people are brand new to the leaderboards. Congratulations to all of them. Congratulations to everybody who’s just out there grinding. You know, they’re at the base of the mountain, but they’re climbing. They’re in our RampUp program, or they’re partway up the mountain, and they can see the summit. You know, they’re in growth, and or maybe they’re like charting new mountains in Tinker. Congratulations to every single gym owner listening to this right now. Like, if you’ve got one client, you are changing a life, and you’re making a difference out there. Thank you. So, we ask these people, what did you do to reach this level? And all these people, like the best entrepreneurs in the world, are crazy generous with their time and their advice.

Chris Cooper (08:10):
They just want to help everybody else. So, here’s what they told me. This is a funny one. So, this guy was midway on the leaderboard: “Hey, what did you do to get to this level?” He says, “Nothing exciting.” And what he means by that is nothing novel. He is very, very good at doing the consistent—consistently the work that matters. I called my former members; I reactivated my past members. I sent two emails minimum per week to everybody on my list. I kept my Google “My Business” page up to date with my address, my phone, and new photos, and I have a new coach coming on. That’s my bottleneck right now. I can’t onboard more people because I don’t have enough coaches, so we’re onboarding a new coach. Nothing in what he just shared is like, “Oh dude; we tripled our ad spend in TikTok,” right?

Chris Cooper (09:00):
It’s, “I did the common things uncommonly well.” The reason I love talking about this gym is they’re so good at business that we would even call that virtuosity, right? They do the common uncommonly well; they do the boring work. They do better and better at the basics all the time. That’s why I’m so proud of them. “Nothing exciting,” he says. Right? What he means is nothing new. He’s working the system and doing it well. So, here’s somebody who is doing some stuff that’s different from other people. And so, this program is a sports-performance program. What he’s doing is he’s brought in like a CSM-type role who manages groups of 100. And so, instead of having one person in charge of the client journey and calling people when they’re sick, he says, “These are your 100. Make sure that they show up, make sure that they stay engaged, make sure they get a birthday card, make sure that they’re making progress,” et cetera.

Chris Cooper (09:54):
Very interesting. And that level kind of sits above coach to take care of the clients, okay? They’re also—so they’re like the direct line of contact for the clients, but that also means that the general manager of this gym, or the owner, only has to talk to a couple of CSMs to hear like how people are doing. Okay? He says, “We’ve also removed our discounts.” Yep, that’s a big deal. Now, he focused heavily on his ARM to get that number up, okay? So, he didn’t go on crazy marketing to boost his revenue, and instead he spent the last quarter focusing on his ARM. And now what he said is that he noticed that his big groups were more profitable and so more desirable for his coaches. And so, what he did with his one-on-one was he started shifting them to semi-private so that the coaches could still make lots of money per hour.

Chris Cooper (10:43):
And he said that coaches can now make about $150 an hour in semi-private, or they can make something, you know, around 100 coaching big groups too. Okay? Another thing that he does too is he really went all in on what he calls spirit wear, which is like apparel. So instead of ordering, you know, from like, an external provider and taking a small margin, he actually bought a heat transfer machine. He was doing so much apparel, and one of his staff runs this, basically, and it’s absolutely bananas what he’s making now. He does get this $500,000 a year in revenue from apparel that’s branded apparel from his sports-specific gym. Okay? So, keep that in mind; that’s incredible. And by doing the work himself with like—you know, it’s not a highly paid labor job to do that. You just have to be consistent and produce this stuff.

Chris Cooper (11:37):
He’s making a really great margin on that—better than you would on your own. I do a different tactic with retail. I don’t want to be designing stuff; I don’t want to be printing it. I would rather take the smaller margin and just have somebody else worry about all that junk for me. But this guy at this level, at this scale, with this many clients, he says, “Nope, it’s worth it for me to do it in-house.” And he does. The next person says—this person really, really wants to be anonymous. But they did share some top tips. And what they said is that they’ve really added a gigantic competition, and that really helps them out too. So, what they’ve asked for is sponsors to donate $2,000, and if they did that, they got on the banners, they got on the t-shirts, et cetera.

Chris Cooper (12:19):
They’ve got like 150 people competing in this competition. Suffice to say, we’ve talked about running big competitions before, and we can link to that. I really want to protect this person’s privacy. They’re going through some stuff right now. They were very generous to share this with us, and we thank them. Next, this gentleman who runs this gym says that they are using a 10-week program that they call Ready to Change. This person charges 450 euros for this, so a little bit more in USD. It’s a 10-week program. It gets people jumpstarted into their gym, it onboards them, and then they work on converting them to ongoing memberships. What’s really interesting here is we see this trend continuing where these were very popular in the States—2018, right? When Facebook ads were really cheap in the States, you would see these kinds of challenges.

Chris Cooper (13:09):
But the bottom line here is like on Facebook, the term challenge is still the top performing ad you can run, right? A lot of people got away from it because the gym owner themselves, they were bored with it or they, or they did it one way that didn’t feel good, and so they stopped using the challenge on Facebook at all. But you can still use it, you can do it in a good way. And that’s what this gym is doing. They’re charging 450 euros for a 10-week Ready to Change program. They learn about mindset, nutrition, and all the other fitness streams that they charge money for—personal training, group training—and then they convert them into ongoing memberships, and it’s been really, really good for them. So, I said you see these trends happening. CrossFit is growing, especially moving into like eastern and southern Europe, moving into Asia.

Chris Cooper (13:55):
You know, this kind of thing is happening. And, while it seems like the trends are maybe five years behind the U.S., some of the stuff that worked in the U.S. really, really well five years ago is working in eastern Europe, is working even in western Europe, and is still working in the U.S. if you tweak it a little bit and do it a little bit differently. And, you can be proud to run it; it doesn’t feel like the slimy tactic that maybe was run five years ago, okay? To us, this gym says the biggest difference to us for our revenue was the No Sweat Intro process. We’re doing better at it; we’re improving it all the time, but it’s making a difference with how people proceed in our company. When we used free trials, we had a lot of people come in, they would try it, they would sign up, but they would drop off, and so our LEG went downhill, and that dramatically affected our revenue.

Chris Cooper (14:39):
He says, “I had a No Sweat Intro this morning, and right away, he signed for the PT On-Ramp option. And it’s one reason that we were adding more new members and also more revenue. You get that personal touch right from the start.” This is still his words. And also, they call every lead within two hours of their booking. “They’re always say that they’re impressed when we call them back right away. They say that they’re very delighted that it’s so professional. And we also do roleplay with our team on NSI.” So, they really credit the NSI. Hey, I’ve got to tell you this story. So earlier this month, I shared a podcast about the comeback of my gym, Catalyst. And the one role that I’m still sitting in about half the time is sales.

Chris Cooper (15:20):
I do a lot of the NSIs—maybe half of them. And I had a gentleman join my gym. I love this guy from first sight. He used to do CrossFit in the Philippines, okay? And uh, so we book him for a No Sweat Intro. He’s moved to Canada now. He’s working here—booked him for this No Sweat Intro. We talked to him back and forth through GLM, doing our lead nurture with him. So, I feel like I know him a little bit already. He comes in, he says, “Yeah, you know, I did CrossFit in the Philippines about a year ago, really liked it, but obviously I moved to Canada, so I stopped.” And so, I said, “Okay, well great; let’s talk about your goals.” And then I put him on the InBody, and I measured. You know, “Where are we going? What do we want to do?”

Chris Cooper (15:58):
And he’s like, “I really like the groups. Fantastic. Let’s start with our On-Ramp program. Here’s the price.” “Okay, well, how much are groups going to cost me when I get to that point?” I tell him the price, and he says, “Wow, you know, I’ve got to tell you: CrossFit costs twice as much here as I was paying in the Philippines. But they never asked me about my goals. They never put me on this scale that tells me about my body fat and gives me this printout. They never told me what was best for me.” He’s like, “Now, I get it. This is the real experience, but I don’t want to tell you the name of that other gym because this is obviously how it’s supposed to be done, and I don’t want them to get into trouble.” Well, I had kind of a laugh because, you know, out of all the Two-Brain gyms in the world, we’ve worked with 1,500 to 2,000 of them—more than anybody else.

Chris Cooper (16:45):
And those gyms are offering No Sweat Intros, but there are 10,000 other CrossFit gyms who aren’t. And so, it’s amazing to hear from somebody who’s experienced both sides that he feels this is the right way to do it. I love that so much. Okay, back to the leaderboard. So, this gym, they said, “Actually this is our lowest revenue in several months for a couple of reasons, but we’re still proud to make the leaderboard anyway. We usually do even better.” And they said that they improve their revenues by improving their ARM. And they do that with specialty seminars. “Last month, we started a 12-week, twice-a-week Olympic seminar at $240 per month. And we had 12 people commit to the three months. So, $720 for that Olympic lifting program.” Great job guys. “We have one going on almost all the time. We decide on the seminars based on the goal reviews.” So, they run these goal reviews with their clients every three or six months. They look at like, “Here’s the total of the feedback that people are giving us. Oh, people want more Olympic lifting. Wonderful. We can change our programming, or we can offer this specialty program.”

Chris Cooper (17:50):

“We know that there are 12 to 20 people who want this, and we want to be able to do an amazing job with it—not just add another class to the schedule and throw another coach in and teach the exact same stuff. We want to do a great job. We’re going to charge something that’s valuable and bring the value—720 bucks for three months of it. It’s twice a week for 12 weeks.” And boom, their ARM is way up, and they use rolling seminars, so they overlap a little bit. That keeps their ARM high, and that puts them on our revenue leaderboard. So, congratulations, everybody. Like if you’re a gym owner, and you’re not making $50,000 a month, you deserve to be doing $50,000 a month in revenue. You are out there providing a service to your community that nobody else is. You are saving lives; you’re saving your clients money—like it costs a hundred thousand dollars to have a heart attack right now. You deserve to be successful.

Chris Cooper (18:40):
Revenue is one of the metrics that we use to track that success. I’m really proud of everybody who is out there being successful, providing value and getting value in return. Hey, if you want to chat about this or get our free guides to help you with some of this stuff, just go to gymownersunited.com. It’s a free group. I try to get in there about once a day and answer questions, but we’re always in there sharing guides, answering questions, commenting on posts, and there are 8,000 other gyms in there helping each other grow too. I’m Chris Cooper, this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thank you for your service, and congratulations to everybody on the revenue leaderboard this month.

The post Big, Sexy Gym Metrics: Our Revenue Leaderboard appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

$93,000 Monthly Revenue? Our Top Gym Killed It!

Money doesn’t solve every problem—but it solves the money problems.

So how do you make more money to support your family, your staff and your clients? A host of gurus want to sell you their secret plans and tactics to “flood your gym with leads.”

I want to tell you how great gyms actually generate more revenue.

To get the info that will help you improve your business, we tracked revenue in gyms around the world, and we identified and verified the Top 10 gym owners. Then we interviewed them so we could share their methods with you.

Here are the revenue leaders in Two-Brain in September 2023:

Here’s how they posted these amazing numbers:

“Calling former members, reactivating past members. Sending at least two emails, minimum, consistently to the email list. Keeping our Google My Business page up to date—address, phone and photos. We have one new coach coming on, and that will allow us to take on more members.”

“We have head coaches or client success manager roles now—eight of them all together. Each will manage 100-125 people. We adapted this concept from Two-Brain. They are the direct point of contact for the clients. This role, plus the GM role, has helped create more delineation in the staff. These coordinators get paid on the number of members under them, so they are incentivized to keep their clients and acquire more.”

“We’ve removed our discounts.”

“We have a big competition this weekend coming—128 competing! Seventh year running. We likely brought in about $25,000 from the Autumn Games. The goal with the comp was to get five new members, but we got 15.”

“We added PT because of our mentor, Storm. I can ID someone that is a fit for PT vs. group. We have five PT coaches now (zero before). We raised all the prices for PT and increased the onboarding from $100 to $195 for nutrition. I’ll do a holiday group challenge in November.”

“The last month we had our special program: Ready to Change, at 450 euros. It’s a 10-week program to get clients to learn everything about themselves and make a blueprint to see everything we offer, too. We had 39 people join for this quarter. After 10 weeks, they’ll have their blueprint and know what they want to join. It’s a great process to get them really bought in. I’m assuming 25-30 will continue. Front-end revenue will continue to increase after the 10 weeks again. … This program makes a big jump in revenue. We start the marketing (Facebook ads) six weeks ahead of the start of the program … . Both word of mouth and marketing are selling it. Clients are convinced that they get confidence and education from the 10 weeks, and then they are warmed up and ready to continue with membership. A lot of couples join together, and friends.”

“What made a huge difference was the whole No Sweat Intro (NSI) process. … When we used free trials, we had people drop off, and engagement lacked. I had an NSI this morning, and right away he signed up for the PT on-ramp. It is one of the reasons that we’ve had more new members.”

“We add a personal touch right from that NSI booking. We call every lead within two hours of booking. They always say that they are impressed when we call them back right away. They say they’re very delighted that it’s so professional. We do a lot of role-play with our team.”

“We improve our average revenue per member (ARM) with specialty seminars. Last month we started a 12-week, twice-per-week Olympic lifting seminar at $240 per month and had 12 people commit to the three months ($720 total). We have one going on almost all the time. We decide on the seminars based on the goal reviews. Rolling seminars are used as a tool to keep ARM high.”

“Our group training is more profitable than PT for our coaches and business. If someone comes in for private training at $50 for 30 minutes, we pay 44 percent. But instead we promote the teams to bring in six clients for 1.5 hours at $50 each, so that’s $300. This doubles the trainer’s money for the time. This is more similar to the semi-private model.”

“We have found a way to have much higher profit margin in apparel or ‘spirit wear.’ We bought a heat-transfer machine. We order the apparel and then just order the logo from a transfer service. Anyone can make the shirts—very easy. I found the problems in the past were turnaround from screen printers. We were spending $20,000 on screen printers in years previous. Now we’re making $500,000 annually in revenue from apparel.”

“We have put a lot of action points after the NSI. … People talk to us about feeling comfortable—just today someone messaged me that our gym is very inclusive and that’s why they want to join. … We tell them why we don’t do free trials.”

Need More Revenue?

I hope everything you just read helps you improve your bottom line.

But if you’re not sure exactly what to do right now to generate more revenue, a mentor can give you an exact plan. Click here to book a call.

The post $93,000 Monthly Revenue? Our Top Gym Killed It! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Your Gym Vs. Fitness Clickbait That Doesn’t Help Anyone

Cheap gyms aren’t the best gyms for everyone.

You and I know that.

But many consumers don’t, and if they read the wrong articles online, they might focus on the wrong things.

Don’t let that happen.

A few days ago, I entered “gyms” in the Google News search bar to see what was happening in the fitness world. The No. 1 article: “The Best Cheap Gyms in Canada for Beginners in October 2023.”

The piece is, in reality, an SEO-optimized “listicle.” It can be found on the website stocktrades.ca even though it has nothing to do with stocks, and it’s not meant to be particularly helpful. It’s meant to appeal to search engines and lure people onto the website (which it is clearly doing).

Everything in the article is formulaic: The URL contains the search term the article wants to rank for. The intro is full of common search terms such as “low-cost gyms” and “what to look for in a gym membership.”

After the intro, you have the “list”: a quick rundown of the membership features of five major gym chains. It’s just basic info you can easily find on each company’s website: At LA Fitness, “a person can pay a $99 initiation fee, followed by a monthly fee of $45.99.” And so on.

If you want to see the clickbait for yourself, it’s here.

You can tell the article is a trap because it doesn’t link to the websites of the listed gym chains. The author doesn’t want people clicking out to find out more about the gyms or take the next step to getting fit.

Instead, the article is peppered with pop-up ads—lots of them, in various formats. You’ll get all sorts of banner ads, pop-up videos and an obnoxious overlay that offers “quality stock picks” and never goes away. The exact ads you see will be influenced by your browsing (I got ads for banks and 9Round gyms).

Why should this matter to you?

Because if someone in your town looks for info on gyms and gets this article, that person isn’t going to get fitter.

Offer Real Help (With AI)

It’s sad that 90 percent of the internet is more concerned with getting clicks than helping people. Your microgym should carve out some space in the “10 percent” by offering real assistance to people who want to start a fitness program.

Instead of luring people in and bombarding them with popups, your content should give searchers real answers—and, yes, you should tell them about how your business can solve their problems.

You might not be able to compete with stocktrades.ca or any other major websites offering clickbait to everyone in the world, but you can definitely get your site in front of local people if you fill it with great content tailored to your audience.

To help you, I asked ChatGPT to create five headlines for helpful articles you could publish in response to the SEO trap I described above. Here they are, along with a blurb for each:

“Investing in Your Health: Why Quality Matters More Than Price at the Gym”—This article would discuss the value of expert coaching as the fastest way to solve fitness problems.“Beyond the Price Tag: The Hidden Costs of Cheap Gyms”—This article could explore how a lack of accountability and coaching can limit results in the gym.“Personalized Fitness: How Premium Gyms Enhance Your Journey to a Healthier You”—This article would focus on the benefits of personal training, tailored programs and individualized attention at coaching gyms.“The Price of Motivation: How Your Gym Membership Impacts Your Commitment to Fitness”—This article might discuss the psychological impact of investing in a higher-priced gym membership at a facility that offers personalized coaching.“Coaching Gyms vs. Budget Gyms: Which Is Right for You?”—This article could provide a balanced comparison between gyms that sell coaching and those that sell cheap access, helping readers make an informed decision based on their fitness goals and preferences.
“Write It for Me”

You can, of course, then ask ChatGPT to write an article around one of these articles, perhaps like this:

“Please take suggestion number 1 and write a 300-word article tailored to busy professionals in the Chicago area. Be sure to mention that accountability and personalized programming from an expert coach have significant value and help clients get results fast.”

From there, I’d review the copy AI spits out. You can ask for revisions as you see fit. After that, I’d personally adjust the copy to make the article perfect for your audience—and be sure to include a call to action that tells a reader how to book a free consultation with you.

Then copy, paste, post and promote the article across your platforms.

All that might take you 20-30 minutes—just half an hour to give local people an alternative to clickbait that won’t help them take even one step toward health and fitness.

The post Your Gym Vs. Fitness Clickbait That Doesn’t Help Anyone appeared first on Two-Brain Business.