Chris Cooper's Blog, page 57

“I Need Money!”—Top Tips for Year-End Revenue

Chris Cooper (00:02):
“It is the end of the year. Coop, I need revenue. What do I do?” I get asked this question pretty often around this time of year in our free public group, gymownersunited.com. You can join that group by the way. Just go to gymownersunited.com, and you’ll be guided right to it. And I’m in there once in a while answering questions and sharing free guides like this one that I’m about to show you. So, if it were me and I were not in Two-Brain’s mentorship program, and I wanted to generate some cash at the end of the year without giving ridiculous Black Friday deals that are just going to poison the well and hurt me later on, what would I do? Well, that’s why we put this guide together for you. And if you want to get a copy of it, I’ll show it here.

Chris Cooper (00:40):
If you want to get a copy, just go to gymownersunited.com and ask for it, and I’ll just give it to you. Okay, no strings attached. There are five ways that I would use to generate revenue in my gym at the end of the year—if I needed it—without hurting myself with Black Friday deals or paid-in-full discounts or anything like that. I’m going to walk through each one of these for you step by step and tell you exactly what to do. But it’s also in this guide, which you can have just by joining the group. So, the first is a retail presale. Now, at this time of the year, I want cash, and retail is a great way to do it because people are buying things for their loved ones, and they’re trying to find gifts that their loved ones care about.

Chris Cooper (01:16):
But I don’t want to put out a bunch of cash, bring in inventory, and then hope that enough people buy it that I actually make some money. So, what I’m going to do is set something up with our friends over at Forever Fierce where they pick out and create a design for me—maybe two things—and they’re going to set up a form for me, and I share this with the people in my group and the people on my email list. And I say, “Hey look, if you’re a Catalyst client and you want a really cool hoodie, you can share this with your parents; share this with your friends—the people who are dying to figure out what to buy you.” The people who are outside your gym are most likely to buy these things for the people inside your gym. But honestly, there’s a lot of people in my gym who want to buy this stuff right now.

Chris Cooper (01:56):
So, for example, right now, the people in my prime group—the people over 55—are asking me, “How do I get a T-shirt? How do I get a zip-up hoodie? How do I get a Toque?” It’s just French or Canadian for a knit cap. And so, I have these things for them. They’re set up on a pre-order form that Forever Fierce helped me put together. Forever Fierce designed this shirt. I doubt I spent three minutes on this whole project, and it will generally gain me about $1,000 to $2,000 in profit. So, what I’ll do is I will, I’ll put the pre-order form together. I’ll approve the design first, share the pre-order form in my private Facebook group, send it to the clients on my email list, and say, “Hey, forward to your friends if they don’t know what to buy you.” A lot of them will just buy it for themselves anyway. So, this is a really easy task. And in this guide, I give you the easy button that you can press just to connect with Forever Fierce. I don’t make a commission on this; I’m just telling you exactly what I do. And I’ve done this every year at Catalyst. It’s probably the seventh or eighth year that I’ve done this through Forever Fierce. It’s so easy. You can set this thing up in like 10 minutes.

Chris Cooper (02:59):
They’ll probably have a design back to you without within a day or two. And then you just hit “Go.” Your clients get the stuff that they want. They’re already asking for this stuff, or they share it with their friends, and now their friends are like, “Hallelujah. I didn’t know what to buy that gym fanatic. Like, what was I going to get them? A stretching mat, a treadmill for their house? No, I they want a t-shirt, I’m going to get them a t-shirt. They’ll love it. Check. Done off my list.” Alright, the second way that you can generate year-end revenue is gift certificates. Look, this tactic has been around for 20 years. You know, I was doing it before I even opened a gym—back in like 2001. All I would do is put together like a five or a 10 pack of personal training, and I would just send this out to all the people on my email list.

Chris Cooper (03:42):
I would put up signs, “Hey, buy your packs,” and clients buy them for one another. Sometimes parents will buy them for their kids or vice versa. “I want my parents to get started; I want them to get started, right. Here’s a package of five personal training sessions for them.” Uh, I don’t discount those at all. So, five personal training sessions are $399. That’s a one-hour session for 80 bucks each. And people can just like buy them. You are solving their problem already by telling them what to buy for their loved ones. You don’t need to further discount this stuff. And this is a common theme you’re going to hear me say over and over again. You need to get good at providing value, and you don’t provide value by discounting. You don’t provide value by giving like 20% off for buying the package. You provide value by solving problems.

Chris Cooper (04:29):
And so, most of you are underpriced already. I know that’s you. You can admit it. I’m not going to call you on it; I can’t see you. But the reality is that you shouldn’t be further discounting your underpriced rates already. All you have to do is just tell people like, “Here is how to buy this thing,” and they will buy it. So, gift certificates are great. If you want to send people gift certificates that they can buy to prepay for another member, or prepay for a member of their family, or prepay for On-Ramp—that’s a great one. You know, hey, if you’ve got somebody in your family who you’d love to get started, but they’re nervous, they don’t want to commit, you can pay for their On-Ramp. Here is the price, “Click here.” Now you do want to spend 10 minutes setting this up in your billing system.

Chris Cooper (05:10):
So if you’re using Wodify, for example, you want to set up the gift card feature in Wodify. If you’re using Mindbody, Zen Planner, PushPress, Kilo—whatever that is—you want to set that up in your billing system so that people can just click the link, buy it, and it will assign it to the client. And hopefully, you’ll get a little printout that they can have and hold in their hand, that’s tactile—that they can put in an envelope and hang on the tree, or whatever they want to do. Give it to them at a Christmas party. If you don’t have that set up, this will not be perceived as valuable as if it is. And look, if your billing system doesn’t allow you to do this, just make up a really simple PDF with your logo on it that you can just type the recipient’s name into and email to the buyer so that they have something that they can give to their loved one.

Chris Cooper (05:57):
Okay? So, my top gift certificates would be five personal training sessions, 10 personal training sessions, or On-Ramp. Or you could also do like pay for a month of their training and just sell it for its full value. Remember, you’re solving a problem, you’re not giving a discount. Next, a promotion—save your spot for January. So, look, I know you’re going to have an influx of people in January. People are just thinking about their fitness in January. They’re actually thinking about it now, but they might not be willing to start right now. In between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There’s kind of like this this crazy cultural zone where we’re all expected to eat whatever’s put in front of us. And in fact, if you go to a holiday party in our culture and somebody’s like, “You’re not eating the pie. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with this pie?”

Chris Cooper (06:42):
“How dare you.” Right? Like there’s pressure to eat badly more than any other time of the year. You and I are immune to it, of course, right? We solemnly swear, but your future clients are not yet, and they know that. And so, they’re telling themselves these cultural beliefs or pressures or whatever—they’re telling themselves, I’m going to start in January. Well, you can really serve them by having them commit now, and it serves your gym because it boosts your cashflow a little bit during that lighter time. Okay? So, if you say, “I’ll tell you what; we’re only going to take 10 people through our On-Ramp program in January” or five people or whatever that is for me—that’s usually five—I would say, “You can reserve your spot right now with a deposit or even by paying for it now. Look, I know, okay, you’re not ready to commit.”

Chris Cooper (07:29):
“It’s November 30th; you don’t want to start a gym now. I understand. But let’s make sure that you’re scheduled to start with somebody who’s going to hold you accountable, undo the damage that you’re going to do to yourself, and get you on the right track as soon as January 1st happens by booking your spot now. And the way that you reserve that spot at my gym is that you pay for it. Here is the link.” Okay? So, you might not even need to set up a special link. You just make the January On-Ramp session available, or whatever that is, and send that link out to people. Again, you’re solving people’s problems just by putting this solution in front of them and making it easy for them to click one link and pay. As few clicks as possible is necessary. I don’t want them to have to call your gym or schedule something.

Chris Cooper (08:13):
Just like, “Click here to pay.” Okay? That’s it. You’re solving their problem. The fourth way to make money toward the end of the year is to host a “Bring a Friend” holiday party. Now, it’s okay to do this every quarter anyway, but you can have a holiday theme, and you can do a couple of really fun things here. So, one thing you could do is you bring a friend on the last Friday before Christmas or something like that, and you’re going to have a fun partner workout. They can try it. The key here is not like “if they try it, they will buy it.” They never do. The key here is that you get everybody’s information upfront. You have pre-registration required. You throw a fun party. You have some protein samples for people to try and sign up for to pre-order if you want to.

Chris Cooper (08:56):
You have some other healthy snacks. You probably have some music, okay? But this isn’t like your big client celebration party. This isn’t where you all donate gifts to people in foster care—we do that every year at my gym. This is the “Bring a Friend” workout, and so they bring the friend in. You have a fun group program that’s going to involve like some stuff that everybody can do. You’re going to take a lot of pictures of people. You are going to have them stand in front of your whiteboard underneath the CrossFit mistletoe or whatever you want to do, okay? But then most importantly, you’re going to book an NSI with everybody who shows up for this party, okay? What you’re not going to do is have a fantastic party that costs you money and give people a great time and then wave “bon voyage” while they all leave the gym without signing up. You’re going to book an NSI.

Chris Cooper (09:43):

You’re going to talk about their goals, and probably this is going to dovetail into, “Let’s book your spot for January right now.” Okay? So that’s a “Bring a Friend” holiday party. And again, all the steps here that I’m skimming over are all available for free in this guide to you. We just want you to make some money, survive the holidays, and not stress over how much you can afford to buy your kids for Christmas. Alright? I had one call one time with a gym owner where they talked about which piece of equipment they were going to sell so that they could buy their kids’ Christmas gifts. That broke my heart, and I never forgot it, and I never want you to go through that either. Okay? Finally, a January Kickstart specialty group. So, you do want everybody in your gym going through like an On-Ramp program to start, and you can pre-sell that to non-members.

Chris Cooper (10:28):
However, your members are going to want something fun and exciting in January also. So, this group is for them. This could be a nutrition kickstart, it could be like a fitness reboot, you know, or a kickstart. And there’s a couple of ways that you can make this really, really awesome. The first is to have a nutrition kickstart for your members, and I’ve got some really great tips here. The second though is to do a reboot for your former members. So basically, this is the only time I would ever do a group On-Ramp is with former members. The benefit here is that you’re giving them like a timeline to sign up, okay? “Hey, you can sign up for this—Catalyst Reboot is what we’ve called it in the past. Come back in, we’re going to start with the foundations, okay? I don’t want you going too hard, too fast.”

Chris Cooper (11:14):
“That’s a recipe for like rhabdo. I want you coming in and we’re going to, we’re going to start from the basics, and you’re going to do with all the other former members that you missed too, okay? We’re limiting this to 10, and that’s our Catalyst Reboot in January.” You send that out to your list, and you’re probably going to get some former members back. As long as you’ve got three or four, it’s going to be a fun group, and you’re basically going through your On-Ramp curriculum with former members but in a kind of group setting. That’s the only time that you’d want to do your On-Ramp as a group by the way. The other option is that you just have a kickstart that’s available to the public, that’s not like your On-Ramp.

Chris Cooper (11:50):
So, it may be more like a 30 day kickstart program: We’re going to have healthy habits, and we’re going to do some like group workouts, but you’re not really teaching them. And you know, honestly, from there, they should go through your one-on-one On-Ramp program anyway. Okay, so three options. One is for your clients: Run a nutrition kickstart. The second is for your former clients: You run a reboot. And the third is for people who are not your clients yet, but you want to bring them in and have a taste. That’s the order that I would prioritize them, and a nutrition kickstart for your clients is probably the easiest and best. Second would be a reboot for your former clients—just a great way to bring them back in. And third is to do some kind of like 30-day challenge for non-clients. I don’t always recommend that last one, but if you’re in a gym where you know you’re just going to get absolutely swamped with people who are coming in in January anyway, on-ramping them as a group might work for you.

Chris Cooper (12:43):
So, to recap, and you can get these step-by-step at gymownersunited.com: A retail presale is usually good for $1,000 to $2,000 for me. Gift certificates are usually good for about another $1,500 on average. You know, people will buy those for their loved ones. A promotion, which is like save your spot for January—it’s not a discount; it’s not a price deal or anything like that—that’s usually going to generate between three and five On-Ramps. These are people who would want to sign up anyway, but they’re like waiting. Now, they’re going to save their spot. Fourth is a “Bring a Friend” holiday party: That should generate hopefully three to 20 more No Sweat Intros for you. And then a January Kickstart should raise the arm of your gym by selling either to your current clients or bringing previous clients back. Or if you’re going to get 30 new people anyway, on-ramping them all properly together and increasing your retention. These are five ways that I would generate revenue at my gym before the end of the year. Get your free guide. Here it is at gymownersunited.com. You’ll see this picture in the group. Just ask for it, and we will give it to you. Happy holidays, and we’ll see you in 2024.

The post “I Need Money!”—Top Tips for Year-End Revenue appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Sell With Bonuses

Do you want to know the top reason gym owners offer discounts?

“Marketing.”

But there are a dozen or more reasons why slashing prices is actually bad marketing.

Yes, a limited-time offer can motivate a teetering lead to sign up in your sales office. The problem: A discount is worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and a free water bottle might be enough to close the sale.

For example, if you charge $150 per month, you offer 20 percent off to police, and your average client stays for 1.5 years, that’s a gift worth $540 to every cop in your gym.

Could you afford to pay $540 to recruit every new client?

Could you afford to donate $540 to a local police officer right now? How about every cop who walks into your gym?

Most of us don’t run the numbers. We try to solve a short-term problem (how to get them to sign up) but create a long-term problem in the process (not enough cash, unequal pricing).

So how can we push prospective clients to buy without creating problems?

With bonuses.

Bonuses That Don’t Break the Bank

Just a bit of added value trumps a reduced price.

Consider these options:

1. “If you register for our on-ramp before Thanksgiving, I’ll give you our Holiday Meal Planner guide for free. It’s usually $75, but I think it’s really going to help you.”

2. “Nutrition coaching is probably your ideal starting point, but I want to help you build an exercise routine while we dial in your nutrition. If you’re up for it, I’ll give you a four-week walking plan if you’re ready to start today. What do you think?”

3. “Tell you what: I was going to say, ‘Let’s start after Thanksgiving,’ but that story you told me really hits home. Why don’t we bring your partner in for a 2:1 personal-training session next week? It’s usually $105, but it’s on me because I think that will help keep you on track. How’s that sound?”

Remember, the bonus you give must be valuable to the client. It doesn’t have to be costly for the business or take a lot of effort to deliver.

Real-World Example

My favorite “bonus”: I was doing a No Sweat Intro with an undercover cop. He spent a lot of time sitting in trucks, waiting for something to happen.

I gave him a prescription as I do in every No Sweat Intro, but then I asked, “How do you keep from getting bored all the time?”

He said, “It’s a challenge. I listen to audiobooks.”

I whipped out my catalogue and showed him some of my favorite audiobooks. We spotted three that I thought he’d love.

“I’m going to send you these three audiobooks—it’s on me,” I said.

“Um … what?”

“I’ll ask you what you think about the books at our PT sessions. OK?”

“You’re giving me homework?” he asked with a laugh.

“Yes, I’m serious,” I said.

“OK, sign me up,” he said. “This was great. Before I came in, I was worried this was going to be some kind of sales pitch or something!”

The undercover cop signed up for our $400-per-month premium service—and then he signed up his wife and son, too.

Consider Value

Bonuses can help you close a person who’s on the fence. But you don’t need to hurt your business long term by giving a discount that costs you money every single month.

What asset has value to the prospective client right now but can be given away by the gym without long-term cost? Think about free guides, templates, planners or even courses or seminars.

Do not offer a month of free classes—that’s too valuable.

Offer just enough value to motivate prospective clients, then focus on coaching them to accomplish their goals fast.

The post How to Sell With Bonuses appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Denying Discounts: A Short Guide for Gym Owners

Hard truth in the gym world: Discounts kill businesses.

Even if you know that, it’s still hard to say “no” when someone asks for a rate reduction—especially if a nearby gym is slashing prices in an everything-must-go fire sale.

To help you do the right thing for your business, I’ve got a list of the easiest ways to decline when someone asks you to chop your prices.

1. “We don’t have discounts.”

This one is my No. 1 response. I don’t reduce prices for anyone, so I can simply say “discounts don’t exist here.” This four-word statement has solved our “discount” problem for almost a decade.

2. “We don’t play those games.”

Say this if another gym is slashing prices for people.

Discounts are “subjective”—they require a human “decision” to be made. So it’s easy to question the intent of the discounter.

When I sold high-end fitness equipment, the store was always losing price battles to department stores that had constant “sales” on treadmills. When someone asked when we’d have a sale or requested a price match, I just said, “We don’t play those games.”

This line had the desired effect: You could see a visible shift in purchasers as they became suspicious of the stores offering the discounts. Why? Some of the stores were playing games. One of them was sued for advertising a regular price on tires that it never actually charged. Stuff was always on sale, and the “discounts” were fake—I brought that up from time to time.

3. “We treat all our service professionals equally well because we know our service is critical for your safety.”

Use this one when police, military personnel, firefighters and others ask about discounts.

Members of some service groups receive discounts from other businesses, so they’re sometimes inclined to ask for them at gyms.

But you provide a greater service to members of these groups than $20 off: You help them get fit so they can stay safe on the job. Gently remind them of that and anchor your position by referencing their peers: “No one else gets a discount, and you don’t want to be different from the crowd, do you?”

Bonus: If you are a veteran yourself and you’re running a fitness business, you’ve already sacrificed enough (thank you for your service). Now it’s time for you to get paid fairly for the value you provide.

4. “This rate is as inexpensive as possible for this level of service.”

Use this when someone asks why you charge more than other local gyms.

Do not ever use the word “cheap”—unless you’re talking about the competition.

What you’re doing here is sticking a big wedge in the conversation: “for this level of service.” The phrase gives you a place to lay out the value you deliver—but don’t go there unless you’re asked to.

Additional Advice

A few more notes:

Don’t over-explain. These one-sentence responses are simple and direct. Saying more usually just encourages the person to keep trying to get a discount.

Keep it black and white. If you offer a discount to one person in your gym, everyone else is being treated unfairly.

Your primary duty is to your current clients. Offer huge value to your current clients and treat them like gold. How will they feel if you suddenly throw discounts at new clients while they pay full price? It’s far easier to retain great clients than acquire them.

Don’t run through all the scenarios in your head before a conversation starts. If you try to “get your lines memorized,” your answers won’t feel natural and honest. Strive to be forthcoming and direct, not overly rehearsed.

If they say, “I’ll go join the cheaper gym,” that’s a win. You want the best clients, not all the clients. Focus on high-value clients. If people want the cheapest rate, they’re better off elsewhere.

Finally, don’t presume anyone wants a discount. This is the biggest mistake business owners make: We project our own budgets onto other people.

Lower Prices Require More Clients

When my gym opened more than a decade ago, I was desperate for cash flow. So I started offering all kinds of discounts, and I constantly added groups to the discount list.

I’d actually try to find a reason to drop my prices. Before a prospective client even asked about pricing, I performed mental gymnastics to try and find a reason to offer a cut rate. Soon my gym was full of members but I was working 15 hours a day and coming home to a shrinking bank account.

Every time you give a 20 percent discount, you increase the number of clients you need to run a profitable business.

You weaken your business and impoverish your family by slashing rates. Build value instead.

You know why no one ever asks me for a discount?

We don’t have discounts.

The post Denying Discounts: A Short Guide for Gym Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The 2023 Black Friday Survival Guide for Gym Owners

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Black Friday happens on November 24th this year, and it can bring trouble for gym owners. Every year, gym owners ask questions about offering discounts and deals, and too many of them slash their rates when they don’t have to, or they cut prices in these desperate attempts to attract new members who are really just bargain seekers—and who won’t stick around for the long term. The best gyms in the world don’t offer discounts ever because they don’t need to, and especially not when Black Friday and the holiday season rolls around. Today, I’ll tell you why you should avoid discounts and exactly how you can say no to them. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and if you have questions about gym ownership, including discounts and sales, go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free group. You’re invited into that group to chat, ask questions. I’m in there about once a day. The Two-Brain mentors are in there more frequently, and it’s just our free service to help gyms grow. The first thing I want you to remember is that your mission is to build value for clients, not to offer them bargain basement memberships that come with a free bag of expired pre-workout powder. That means you need to build value and not weaken your foundation with discounts.

(01:11):
We’re going to start with why gyms, in general, shouldn’t have sales. The main reason is that you’re not selling a product, you’re selling a service. Your goal is not simply to sell more because your most valuable resource, which is time, is finite. You can run out of it. Product companies—people who are selling little toys and TVs and software even—they want to sell high volume because the cost of production decreases as they sell more units. They can buy more parts in bulk. They can negotiate volume discounts with suppliers. They can streamline their production. You can’t do any of those things. You can only sleep less or work out less. This means that it’s important to sell our service at the rate that will make us profitable, gain a professional image, and avoid problems that make our business unstable. Here are the reasons:

(02:01):
The best gyms don’t discount rates or have sales—from both sides of the coin. First, discounts attract the wrong people because we don’t have unlimited time and attention. Then, spending that same time and attention on a client who pays us 20% less than everybody else is robbing us of what we could earn in that same time. Our rent doesn’t go down 20% when we give a client a discount. All the savings come from a profit.

(02:28):
The second reason is that sales teach the right people bad habits. Ask yourself who is most likely to purchase a one-year paid-in-full discount membership. It’s the client who’s most likely to stick around for that year anyway, so why discount them? A 20% discount for paying upfront might seem like a good idea in January if you haven’t fallen into this trap before. But even a discount of 8.5% is equivalent to a free month. A 20% paid-in-full discount means that your best clients, the ones who are most likely to stick around for the full year anyway, are attending for free after October 15th. And worse, it teaches these great people to wait for another sale before signing up again. When you seize this bad habit of having these sales, they don’t think, “Well, that was good while it lasted. I was getting a bargain. I’m really thankful. I’m happy to pay full price.” Instead, they think, “Well, now I’ve got to pay 20% more for the same service.”

(03:25):
The number three, and maybe the biggest reason that you don’t need to give discounts, is you’re probably underpriced anyway. You’re probably discounting your rate based on your own budget or what you think people are willing to pay, and you really don’t have any margin left to cut. I mean, really, you should be charging probably about 40% more for your basic service. And if you wanted to, you could raise your rate 60% and then give a 20% discount, and you would be where you’re supposed to be, but you’re already probably undercharging. It’s very, very, very common for a gym to come into our program, and they’re in severe financial trouble, despite offering a great package, despite having great retention, despite having great coaches and great care, simply because they’re undercharging for their service. Do not slice that even further, or you’ll be slicing into your own flesh.

(04:11):
Finally, the fourth reason is that discounts and limited time sales are a downward spiral. There’s a limit to how many people your gym can train and keep. That limit might be determined by your size, but more often it’s determined by your client management. If people think that you are the same as every other gym, they’ll just keep price shopping until they get the lowest price. And if you offer discounts, you can’t make it up in volume because your churn will be too high. Toy manufacturers, booksellers, software companies—they can offer discounts because they can scale their service to infinity, and their cost of production decreases as they do. You can’t do that. Your time and attention are finite.

(04:52):
So, here’s how to say no to discounts because you might be getting asked for them. The easiest ways to say no when somebody asks you for a discount are, number one: “We don’t have discounts.” This is my go-to. If you don’t have discounts for anybody, then it’s simplest to just say that discounts don’t exist at your gym, and this often solves all of the discount problems in gym. Right, and for me, when I finally got rid of discounts in my gym, it was really easy for me to just say, “We don’t offer discounts.” That ends the conversation and away you go, right. People don’t want a special deal; they want the best deal that you’re currently offering everybody else. If somebody else is giving discounts and the client comes to you and says, “Hey, I can get a 20% discount for blah, blah, blah at this other gym,” you should respond with, “We don’t play those games.” Because the nature of discount is subjective. It requires this human decision instead of an automated process.

(05:43):
It’s always easy to cast a shadow of doubt on the person who’s doing the discounts. Now, I saw this in action when I was selling high-end fitness equipment. We were always in this battle against department stores that ran these frequent sales on treadmills, but here’s what they were actually doing: They were overpricing their treadmills by 40%, and then at Christmas time they would discount the treadmills by 40%. It was this constant game. Once I realized that was the game that was being played, it drove me crazy.

(06:11):
In a gym world, what’s more likely to happen is that a new or a desperate gym runs this crazy price promotion where the owner really doesn’t know how to run their profitable business, and the clients are like, “Wow, 40% off at that gym.” And they come to your gym, and they’re like, “How come I can’t get 40% off?” And you know it’s because that gym owner doesn’t know what they’re doing, and they’re probably not going to be around in two years. But you’re still tempted to follow them down that road. So, when you say something like, “We don’t play those games,” what you might be doing is planting a seed of doubt in the client. Or if you say, you know, “We run a mature, respectable business,” or something like that, you’re not slandering the other guy, you’re just literally explaining why you don’t give discounts. So, when we were doing this with treadmills, and somebody asked us to match a price—or, you know, they’d have this 40% off sale—the client would come in and ask us, “Can you match their price?” And we’d say, “We don’t play those games.” And it worked. You could see a visible shift in the purchaser as he or she became suspicious of the chains offering the discount.

(07:14):
When somebody asks you for a specific discount—right so, let’s say that they’re a member of a service group, and some members of service groups receive discounts from other businesses, so they are inclined to ask for them everywhere. So, you know, “I’m in the military; can I have a 20% discount?” Right? Or “I’m a police officer; can I have a 20% discount?” What you say is “We treat all of our service professionals equally well because we know our service is critical for their safety.” The service that you provide to military personnel and police officers and firefighters and other safety workers. It’s not five bucks off. That’s not why you’re here. You’re here to keep their butts alive, so remind them gently and also use the peer anchor. “Nobody else gets a discount, and you don’t want to be different from the crowd.” Right.

(08:00):
Now, I need to kind of qualify this because I have a lot of gym owners who are former military in Two-Brain—or maybe current military even—and when they are asked, “Do you give discounts?” They often do, and I say, “Well, is that why you signed up for military service?” And they said, “Hell, no.” And some of them even get offended when they’re offered discounts by other people. But they still offer them in their gym, and they can’t give me a logical reason why not. So, these are often some of the people who are the first to get rid of discounts in their gym once they realize that the discount isn’t helping them. They might think that the discount is helping them with marketing—it’s not. I’ll talk to you about that later. All right.

(08:38):
So finally, when somebody says, you know, “Wow, your rates are so much higher than everybody else’s. You’re so expensive compared to that gym down the street,” what you say is, “This this rate is as inexpensive as possible for this level of service.” Now, you don’t ever say “cheap,” unless you’re talking about the competition, right? You never say like, “Well, this is as cheap as I can do it.” Second, you’re sticking a wedge into the conversation. When you say, “For this level of service, this rate is as inexpensive as possible for this level of service,” that should prompt an opportunity for more explanation, right? But you don’t have to expand unless you’re asked. Most people will say, “What do you mean?” and then you can explain why your service is better.

(09:18):
Here’s some additional advice when you’re asked for discounts. Number one: Don’t over explain. All these responses consist of one sentence—that I’ve shared with you, right? The more words that you use, the more handholds that you give the person asking for a discount, and it looks like you’re waffling; it looks like you’re backpedaling. Second, keep it black and white. If you give a discount to one person in your gym, you’re literally ripping off everybody else, right? Because you hope that they don’t find out. That’s hard to live with.

(09:43):
Third, your primary duty is to your current clients, so scrambling to recruit new clients with discounts that your current clients can’t get is like a breach of trust. You’re telling your current best clients: “These new people are more important than you, so I’m willing to do the same service that I’m giving you for less money.” Next, don’t run through all the scenarios in your head before a conversation starts. You’ll be trying to memorize your lines instead of giving honest answers, which come naturally. You can practice the lines that I’ve given you here if you want until they feel like your own. Especially if you’re using the really simple sentence, “We don’t give discounts,” communication becomes really easy and transparent.

(10:23):
Now, if a client says I’m going to go join that cheaper gym, then that’s good because you don’t want everybody. Don’t pour your care into fickle clients who are only after the cheapest rate because while you might be the cheapest rate today, soon somebody else will be, and they’ll go to them anyway. Finally, don’t presume that anybody wants a discount. This is the number one error that business owners make. We project our own budgets onto other people, so remember that lower prices require more clients to make the same money. Every time you give somebody a 20% discount, you have to increase the number of clients that you need to reach “Your Perfect Day.” You weaken your business, and you impoverish your family by chasing the wrong metric. You know why nobody ever asked the top gym owners for discounts? Because they don’t give any, even on Black Friday. So, I want you to ditch discounts and do this instead:

(11:10):
Instead of creating a special discount on Black Friday, here’s a plan to increase the value of your service to your clients. Step one: Have a conversation about goals. We call this a No Sweat Intro, but you can call it whatever you want. Just sit and talk about clients’ destinations before you start selling the maps. Step two: Draw a map. Now, you’re going to make a custom map for the client from the destination backward to where the client is now. You’re a coach; this is called coaching. Include all the elements the client will need to get to the destination, including an exercise plan, nutrition, accountability, and even sleep.

(11:46):
Step three: Walk the client through the plan. Step four: If the client agrees with the plan, they’ll tell you or you can ask them, “Does it sound like a good plan to you?” If they care about their measurements, take measurements, and then give them the price for that plan, or at least the first steps. Then, you’re going to plan your next meeting to occur within the next 90 days. So, “Here’s the plan. Do you agree? Great; here’s the price.” They’re signing up. “Let’s meet again within 90 days, and let’s measure you again.” And when you meet up again, celebrate every win with the client between their appointments. So, don’t wait 90 days to talk to them. Every time something goes right, celebrate that—text them, call them, send them an email, and then, when you do meet up again, measure their progress. If they’re not getting good results, change the map. If they’re getting great results, keep the map. That’s all you have to do. Change the price if the map changes, and schedule a third meeting, and then just repeat this forever.

(12:38):
This is called the prescriptive model, but it’s really just good coaching. How do you add value to your service? You provide what your clients need to be successful. You don’t cut your rate. Remember that value is determined by your clients, not by you. So, asking your clients, “Where do you struggle most in your pursuit of fitness?” is a great place to start, and they’ll tell you where you can add value to their lives—making your service more valuable instead of just looking exactly like everybody else and trying to do it for less. In general, we find that clients need help coaching in four areas: sleeping, eating, moving, and maybe their mindset. If you solve those problems, you’ll make more money, and you’ll never have to offer discounts again. So, as a special bonus, now I want to tell you how to sell with bonuses—a bonus of bonuses.

(13:25):
The main reason that gym owners give discounts is marketing. They somehow think that if they give 20% off, that’s going to attract more people, or that there’s this big herd of people waiting outside their door for the price to come down. There are a dozen reasons why discounting your price is bad marketing, and I’ve already covered a bunch of them: You’re attracting the wrong people; you’re teaching the right people bad habits; etcetera. There’s no denying that a limited time offer can push a teetering lead into signing up when they’re in your office.

(13:53):
The problem is that if you offer them a percentage off the membership price, you’ll give them a discount worth hundreds—or even thousands—of dollars, when a free water bottle might be enough. So, for example, if you charge 150 bucks a month and you offer 20% off to firefighters, and your average client stays for a year and a half, then that’s a gift worth 540 dollars to every firefighter in your gym. Could you afford to pay 540 dollars to recruit every new client? Could you afford to donate 540 dollars to a local firefighter right now? How about every firefighter who just walks in your gym? See, most of us don’t do the math. We don’t figure out what it’s actually costing us. We try to solve a short-term problem, which is how to get them to sign up, but we create a long-term problem in the future, which is not enough cash and unfair pricing.

(14:40):
So how do we push potential clients to sign on the dotted line? With bonuses. Bonuses that don’t break the bank are what we’re after here. A little added value beats a lower price. So, think about these options. Number one: If you register for our On-Ramp before Christmas, I’ll give you a holiday meal planner guide for free. It’s usually $79, but I think it would really help you out. Now, in this case, you’re giving them an asset that you’ve built once, and you can sell forever or give away forever if you want to. Maybe you don’t ever sell it, but it’s on your site listed as a $79 value. The point, though, is that it’s worth $79 to them. It has to actually be valuable.

(15:18):
Second option is: “I think nutrition coaching is your ideal starting point, but I’d like to help you build an exercise routine while we’re dialing in your nutrition habits. So, if you’re up for it, sign up for our nutrition program, and I’ll give you a 30-day walking plan if you’re ready to start today. How does that sound?” Okay? So, again, the 30-day walking plan is something that you’ve built once that you just are willing to give them because it has value, even if you’re not selling it for a price point anywhere else.

(15:44):
The third option is you say, “Hey, I’ll tell you what. I was going to say let’s start after the holidays, but that story you told me really hits home. Why don’t we bring your husband in for a two-on-one personal training session next week? It’s usually $105, but this time it’s on me. I think that will help keep you on track. How does that sound?” Now, remember the bonus that you give must be valuable to the client. That doesn’t mean that it’s expensive to produce or it takes a lot of effort on your part. So, if a client is booking a one-on-one session, telling them to bring their spouse in to do a two-on-one is great marketing. It’s a great support for the client, and it doesn’t cost you any more time. Here’s a real-world example. This is my favorite bonus ever.

(16:24):
I was sitting in this No-Sweat Intro session with an undercover cop, and we were talking about his job and the long hours that he was spending just sitting in trucks waiting for something to happen. So, I made him a prescription, you know, “Here’s what you need,” and I gave him some homework, or I promised that I’d give him homework that he could do to keep from seizing up on stakeouts when he was just sitting in his truck. You know kind of kyphotic posture all day. But then I asked, “How do you keep from getting bored all the time?” And he said, “Well, it’s a real challenge, so I just listen to audiobooks.” So, I pulled up my audiobook catalog, and I showed him some of my favorites, and he’d read some of them. But we spotted three others that I thought he would absolutely love.

(17:01):
So, I said, “Okay, I’m going to send you these three audiobooks. It’s on me; you’re going to love them.” And he was really taken aback. He said, “What?” And I said, “I’m going to ask you what you think about them when we’re doing our personal training sessions. Is that cool?” And he said, “Are you giving me homework?” Like he laughed, and I said, “Yeah, I’m serious. I’ll give you these books. We’ll talk about them in your PT sessions.” And he said, “Okay, sign me up.” And then he said, “This was great. You know, before I came in, I was worried this was going to be some kind of sales pitch or something.” So, he signed up for our $400 per month premium service, and then he brought in his wife and son too, and what it cost me was about $36 in audiobooks.

(17:38):
When you’re signing people up, you need to consider value, not discounts. Bonuses can help you sign up a client who’s not sure, but there’s no need to injure your business long term by giving a lifetime discount or even an annual discount. Do not mortgage the future for the sale today. What’s an asset that has value to the client but can be given away by the gym for free? You know? Think about a free guide, or a template, or a planner, or even a course that you can deliver online that doesn’t require any more of your time. Don’t give away a free month of classes. Don’t give away a free one-on-one personal training session. Don’t give away anything that other people are paying for, but give something of value to help push people over the line.

(18:18):
I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Look, you’re probably charging way too little already. Don’t discount any more. Don’t kill yourself for the sake of Black Friday. This is the death spiral that kills so many gyms, and I’m really desperate to save them. Instead, offer bonuses to help get people signed up on time, get going before Christmas, and change their life. If you have more questions about this, please go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free Facebook group and discussion for gym owners. There’s over 8,000 gym owners in there right now. It’s incredibly helpful, as anybody in there will tell you. We share resources, tips, and conversation all the time. Thank you for your service.

The post The 2023 Black Friday Survival Guide for Gym Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Kill Your Gym: The Paid-in-Full Discount

Most gym owners and fitness coaches are undercharging people.

And the majority of fitness pros who are undercharging people are amplifying the problem by discounting prices that are already too low.

Discounting your rates can be disastrous.

Do the math and you’ll realize that giving a 20 percent discount to five clients means you need a sixth to make up the difference. So instead of focusing on five clients, you now have to manage six.

Multiply that to microgym scale and you’ll see that giving 20 percent discounts to 100 people means you actually need 120 members to generate the same revenue you’d earn with 100 people at full price.

In that scenario, you’re always trying to find new clients instead of serving the ones you have. So you’re constantly marketing, and your retention is getting worse and worse. You’re actually working way harder for the same amount of money—and your gym is probably dying.

In 2023, more gym owners understand the danger of discounts, but if you don’t, read this:

“Why We Don’t Have Sales”

What’s the most lethal discount a gym owner can give?

The would be the paid-in-full (PIF) discount. For example: a client pays for 10 months in advance and gets two months for free.

As a mentor to many CrossFit gym owners, I’ve had a ringside seat for a few PIF disasters. Here’s one sad tale.

Harry’s Tale

Harry opened a gym in 2016 following the typical template: working out in his garage with CrossFit.com programming, inviting his neighbors to join in and then backing into a business. When he hit 50 members, he needed to rent space, and he needed money for the first time.

Instead of taking a loan, he self-financed the expansion by offering his members a deal: pay for a year in advance and get two months for free!

Mistake 1

Harry assumed his clients knew they’d lose their money if his gym didn’t survive. But most of his clients—friends and neighbors—didn’t understand that. And now you know why many states have laws against PIF memberships.

Mistake 2

Harry “financed his loan” at a much higher rate than any bank would charge: Each “free month” is an 8.5 percent cut to his annual rate. By giving away two free months, Harry had to pay the exact same bills with 17 percent less revenue.

He didn’t notice the problem at first because everything seemed peachy. In January 2017, with PIF payments in hand, Harry was flush with cash, and he made some mistakes. He upgraded his equipment, bought a new car and purchased new apparel for his coaches.

Then December came and Harry was broke. The PIF money was long gone, and he wasn’t acquiring new members at the expected rate. The business still looked viable, but rent was due, so Harry played the same bad card twice with another round of PIF discounts.

Harry’s newer clients jumped at the discount, but his old members didn’t: “Wait. We still have two months left on our memberships.”

Harry generated some cash and got to the end of 2017. Some new clients showed up in January. On Feb. 28, his long-term clients asked a question: “If we pay for another year, can we get another two months off?”

Harry, desperate for cash, said “hell yeah!” and started collecting the money.

Mistake 3

Harry’s PIF deal brought him a load of cash in March 2018. Then he made more mistakes: He bought his coaches more apparel and installed a coffee bar.

You know how it ends: By December, Harry was desperate for cash again. He suddenly realized he was trapped in a downward spiral. The reality: He’d have to coach his current members for a full four months for free before they paid another cent, and his new clients weren’t making up the difference.

So Harry had to offer the same discount to all newcomers just to pay the rent. He was completely trapped.

Mistake 4

Harry believed the answer to his cash-flow problem could be found by increasing his client count: “With 20 percent more clients, I can fill in the cracks my discounts are creating,” he thought.

But when your target is “more members,” you actually have an incentive to discount your membership to acquire them—and the downward spiral perpetuates.

Focus on This

Remember: Your enterprise is a high-value coaching business.

Your primary metric isn’t headcount but client value. Focus on increasing value and driving up your average revenue per member (ARM).

For perspective, the top Two-Brain gyms create so much value for clients that their ARM scores are between $430 and $679.

Discounts erode client value in the name of “getting more people.” They kill ARM.

Don’t chase headcount. Focus on providing value.

That advice is even more important with Black Friday approaching. If you want to know exactly how to navigate the “sale season” as a gym owner, check out the “Run a Profitable Gym” podcast or our YouTube channel:

The post How to Kill Your Gym: The Paid-in-Full Discount appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How Long Does It Take to Fix a Gym?

How long does it take to “fix a gym”?

The answer depends on your exact definition of “fix,” but I’ll give you a few general numbers:

If you really commit to doing the work, you can significantly improve your fitness business in just 12 weeks.If you continue doing the work, you can reach a major milestone—six-figure earnings as owner—in about two years. (Some people do it much faster.)

So how long does it take to fix a gym?

Not that long—if you’re prepared to do the work.

The numbers I laid out above come from Two-Brain’s internal data set. We track everything, and we know our 12-week RampUp program can help a gym owner make dramatic changes very quickly.

Get this: 93 percent of gym owners add enough new revenue in RampUp to pay for the program—and that’s recurring revenue, not a flash in the pan supplied by some one-time fire sale or crazy gimmick.

That’s just a general stat.

Here’s what the RampUp transformation looks like in reality: Stephanie Fowler of EMPOWERHOUSE Gym told me she was on the verge of shutting down her business. Instead, she signed up for RampUp. This is what she accomplished:

She acquired more new clients in 12 weeks than she had acquired in years.She was able to pay herself a salary for the first time in three years.She stopped putting RampUp fees on her credit card because she had generated enough revenue to cover the cost from her gym’s bank account.

If you want to watch my full interview with Stephanie, you can do so here.

Maybe you want another example. I’ve got one.

A guy named Chris Cooper recently fixed his gym. He’s busy running several businesses that take up almost all his time—like Two-Brain Business, which serves almost 1,000 gym owners around the world.

When Chris reviewed his own gym, Catalyst, in April of this year, he found some problems. In fact, he found so many that he thought about closing the gym or selling it. Instead, he decided to personally use the Two-Brain program he had created to help other gym owners.

Guess what? In five months, Chris was able to put his gym back on track—and he did it while running a giant, worldwide company at the same time.

“By using the stuff that we teach in Two-Brain, my gym was saved,” Chris said.

If you want to hear the whole story in detail, check out the “Run a Profitable Gym” podcast.

Start Fixing Your Gym Today

My point here?

I want you to know you can fix your gym.

You can fix it if it’s newer, small and struggling to grow. You can also fix it if it’s big, old and sinking under the weight of a decade of mistakes.

All you have to do is get help and then do the work. Doing the work probably won’t be a problem for you. You run a gym, after all, and you know how to dig in.

But you might be leery about getting help. The gym world is full of snake oil and BS. I understand. I hope the two videos above give you some insight into what’s possible if you work with an experienced, professional mentor to fix your gym.

If you’re not ready for that step, do this: Follow us on social media—we’re on all the platforms—and join the Gym Owners United group. You’ll get to know Two-Brain, and we’ll make sure you get lots of free resources.

And if you’re ready to start doing the work to fix your gym right now, we can help: Book a call to talk about working with a mentor.

The post How Long Does It Take to Fix a Gym? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How Chris Cooper Saved His Own Gym in 2023

Chris Cooper (00:02):
About five months ago, my gym, Catalyst, got into trouble. That is, I’m sure, not what you’re expecting to hear on this podcast, especially if you’re a follower on Facebook and you haven’t been following Two-Brain for a while. You probably see a lot of business-coachy influencers out there who paint a really rosy picture of their gym, or their former gym if they’ve sold. But from the start in 2008, when I started blogging every single day about my gym, I’ve been open and transparent with all of you. So, thank you for your loyal listenership, your questions, and your care because a lot of you still text and ask, “How’s Catalyst going?” So, I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and if you want to talk about this and you’re in Two-Brain, you know that you can reach out to me anytime, and I’ll give you whatever you want. If you’re not in Two-Brain, go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free public group, and you can ask me questions there, and I’ll answer as clearly as I possibly can to help you. So, what the heck happened?

(00:58):
Today, I’m going to talk about my gym going through a bit of a dip after I expected it to. We’re going to talk about what the bottom level looked like for me, how I had to make the decision on what I was going to do with my gym, and then how I fixed it. And the reason I’m sharing this with you is I think that these lessons will be helpful to you. I’m going to be as step-by-step and as precise as I possibly can be, but also I think it might be inspirational for you if you are at the bottom because a few months ago I was in a pretty dark place with my gym, and I knew that I had options to sell, and I came very close to taking those options. So, let’s get into it, and I’m going to be as open and transparent about everything as I possibly can be. So first, the history of the numbers. At our peak, Catalyst did $72,000 a month. That was kind of our best month ever, like a one and done, and it included some proceeds from an insurance funded program that I built. That program was called Ignite Gym, and I later broke that off and sold it to somebody who is a really passionate practitioner about it.

(02:00)
When we were hitting around 65 to 72 a month, our expenses were about $24,000 a month. Now, that’s our fixed expenses, so that’s our basic salaries, our rent, our power. Those aren’t our variable costs. Variable costs are coaches who get paid when you get paid. So, all of our coaches have been on the 4/9ths model since 2005. That means they’re earning a good wage, but it’s not a fixed expense for me. If there’s no money coming in, the coaches aren’t earning either.

(02:31)
So, when I sold Ignite Gym, our revenue dropped by about 16K, but our expenses dropped by 8K too. The new high watermark of about $56,000 a month in revenue is still pretty good because our fixed expenses were about 16,000. So, of course, that’s plus 4/9ths of the rest, but you can do the math and sit down if you want to. You’ll see that we’re super profitable. So, I also own the building, which meant that the rent expense of $3,500 a month was coming to me. Plus, I had a base wage of $100,000 a year, plus profit on top. In fact, in that year I had to build a garage just to eat up some of my corporate proceeds, so I wasn’t paying tax on them. Now, these numbers are just for context and scale. If you live in Vancouver, your numbers are going to be a lot higher because you should be charging more for your service because the cost of living is higher. If you live in rural Manitoba or whatever, your numbers are going to be lower because your expenses won’t be as high, and so you can compare for yourself. But what’s really important here are three things. Number one: highly profitable. Number two: a fixed wage of $100,000 a year. And number three: There is still profit left over, and I own the building, so that’s what a profitable gym can do for you.

(03:44):
However, here’s the downturn. So, a few things happened between 2018 and now. That five-year stretch was pretty tumultuous. The first thing is obvious: Lockdowns in Canada meant that everybody had a drop in revenue. My gym was locked down for almost two straight years. There were a few brief periods of partial opening and stuff, but we really had to hold fast through two years. And while that was happening, we had big cash reserves, but the foundation really started to get eroded. So, first, my general manager and my head coach—who I absolutely love, still to this day, and they were doing a great job—they couldn’t stay with us because of the new rules. I’m not going to go into detail there.

(04:26):
That meant that we had to put a new GM in place in the middle of chaos. He started during what I would call wartime—completely abnormal situation. He had to manage things as they were happening. Everything was crazy, but that meant that he wasn’t trained during our normal peacetime operations. We also had big coach turnover during that time. Some of the coaches got out of the industry, and some of them went back to school to be nurses or other things. Some coaches just like set up shop in their garage and train themselves, and also, this was really important: A lot of our clients bought equipment for their homes.

(05:02):
We were doing a great job of holding them to their workouts. Our revenue dipped, but it was still really good. Through COVID, it was still over 80%. But when we finally reopened, we had to train new coaches really fast, and the coaches that we had had little in-person group experience. We had nowhere to send them to learn in-person, so they did it all online, and our new GM had to make a really tough transition from coaching clients online to leading brand new staff in-person.

(05:30):
We also expected a surge of clients that never really came. Our ads had been off for two years. Our funnels were pretty much completely gone. I hadn’t written a blog post or sent an email in like two years, and so the pipeline just didn’t exist anymore. Worst of all, and this took me a while to figure out, our best clients—the really dedicated people, but also the people who were the heart and soul of Catalyst, the people who brought energy and enthusiasm to group classes—we had taught them how to train in their garages, and they just stayed there. They had a rig, and they were doing workouts. Maybe they were meeting up with people in the park and doing street parking. I’m calling out street parking there because that’s literally what happened.

(06:11):
And so, while we had a bunch of people who were eager to come back, we really missed those spark plugs—the self-motivated people who would show up every day, raise the energy of the room, welcome the new people. You know who I’m talking about. They stayed home, so my staff was burned out. They were exhausted; they were frustrated—it showed. My new staff hadn’t been trained on our systems. They didn’t have contracts. Some had no in-person coaching experience, and so over the next year, after reopening, we saw a churn of some of the good coaches who were frustrated and burnt. We saw a churn of good clients who said, “It just doesn’t feel the same anymore,” and it was just this constant, slow leak of both, and the big problem was that I turned a blind eye.

(06:55):
I was training on my bike; I was happy on my bike. I was rarely in my gym. I didn’t have to go in to pay the bills or do the accounting. I didn’t look at the books. I didn’t check Zen Planner ever. If I did go into the gym to pick something up, I would walk in when there was nobody there. It would be nice and clean, and it would smell great. I would just love the atmosphere. But I wasn’t there during group times at all because I was doing my own training. You know, I was CC’d on some emails when clients quit and stuff, but I had no real appreciation of what was going on. It was my fault, you know. Don’t let me leave you in any doubt about that.

(07:28):
When I left the management of the gym in 2016, I really abdicated; I handed it over. “Here you go.” I had this new company, Two-Brain Business, to build, and the Two-Brain gyms were getting amazing results. So, I was 100% focused on them, and the stuff that we were teaching Two-Brain gyms was coming from data, not from Catalyst—on purpose. So, I didn’t look at the Catalyst bank account. We took the government CERB loan—it was called—because it seemed like an easy $20,000. And then we bought new equipment with that. We put some coaches through some courses. I bought a metabolic testing device for seven grand, but that was all at the start of lockdowns. We had no idea that we’d have to spread that money out for two years. Right? My fault again. Two years later, by the way, 65% of gyms in Canada say they’re still below 90% of pre-pandemic revenues, and they can’t cover a loan payment that’s coming up in about four months. So, Catalyst luckily had huge reserves because I was leaving money in the company simply because corporate taxes are lower in Canada than personal taxes. But most gyms didn’t have that kind of buffer.

(08:36):
We also underwent massive change, and if it sounds like I’m ranting about all the mistakes I made, it’s because it was the perfect storm. I created all kinds of problems for Catalyst, and honestly, it took having all these problems happen at once to really start driving Catalyst down. If any one of these things had happened one at a time, we probably would have been fine and just naturally recovered because of our own momentum. So, there were some other changes going on during that time too. We changed accountants. The new accountants hadn’t ever seen Catalyst at its peak, so they thought that the P&L they were seeing now was just typical.

(09:12):
And then, between reopening in 2021 and 22, we slowly dipped down closer and closer just to break-even, and we even had a couple of months where the gym lost money. Again though, we had really deep reserves, and so I didn’t really get as worried as I should have gotten. I started paying attention to the P&L maybe about a year ago, so it was kind of like a “Well, that’s weird” moment. I wasn’t worried—more, just angry that the situation had gone so far without even noticing. I replaced my GM. He was a great friend, and luckily, he stayed on as a coach, but the new GM just didn’t have the skills required to pull the gym out of its nosedive because that nosedive was steeper than I thought.

(09:53):
Finally, another huge problem—and this goes on—is that I treat Catalyst like a Petri dish, like it’s my science experiment. So, within like four years, we added Level Method. We dropped and then we reaffiliated with CrossFit. We went from fully in-person to online only. We went from class focus to back to focusing on PT and semi-private. We switched programming at least four times, and every time these things changed, we would lose members who just didn’t know what we were about anymore. We brought heart-rate training in, and then we took it out again.

(10:26):
So, to be honest, all these things were happening at once, and I had no idea how bad things had gotten. Again, that is my fault and my responsibility and nobody else’s. Even if you have a gym that runs itself, you should be absolutely aware of what’s happening in that gym and looking at the numbers. So, we had a revenue problem, and we had a retention problem, but what I’d learned back in 2009 was super important: that revenue and profit and retention—and even client headcount—are the fruits of the tree, and Catalyst was an unhealthy tree. I couldn’t just run marketing to solve my problem. That wasn’t going to do it.

(11:04):
And so, around April of this year, I said, “I either have to fix this or sell it,” and there were people on staff at Two-Brain with good arguments on both sides. Some very smart mentors gave me some reasons to sell. One was data: Even though we track data from 15,000 gyms worldwide, and we use that data to make our decisions at Two-Brain—and we don’t say, “What’s Chris doing at Catalyst?”—as long as I owned Catalyst and was involved in it, I would always see things through that lens. So, for example, when we teach something to gyms at Two-Brain, it’s not just like here’s what Chris did at his gym. It’s something that’s been proven to work in hundreds of gyms worldwide before you even see it. So, we have a very thorough testing process. For example, as an aside, right now we’re testing something for our gym owners that’s super exciting. First it worked in one gym. Then we tested in 10 mentors’ gyms. Then we tracked the data, and if the data is better than what we’re currently teaching gyms, then we adopt this new thing instead, and we roll it out to 50 gyms or 100. And then, if the data is still better than what we’re currently teaching, we upgrade everybody. Okay, so Catalyst is no longer the origin of what we teach at Two-Brain. Catalyst is a Two-Brain gym, so it’s the beneficiary of what we teach at Two-Brain.

(12:19):
But in April, when I finally stepped back into my gym, I found that we were nowhere near the Two-Brain standard. If I put every Two-Brain gym—all 950 current gyms and 3,000 alumni—on a list, Catalyst would have been near the bottom, not the top. At that time, when I figured that out, I had options to sell. Since I owned the building, I could also have just closed down the gym and rented the space. Our vacancy rate in the city is less than 1%, so I could have filled it with a tenant who paid more than Catalyst really fast.

(12:50):
The other argument for closing the gym, or selling it, was that every minute spent fixing the gym was a minute that I wasn’t working on Two-Brain, and it almost felt selfish to fix my own gym when I could be producing content that would help other people fix theirs based on the experience of all the people in Two-Brain and not just me. And finally, when I looked around for a model of successful leaders in the industry who kept their gyms while they were building something bigger, a bigger movement, I couldn’t find any. Even Greg Glassman shut down the original CrossFit gym when the CrossFit movement got too big, and I think he was right to do so. The movement required his full attention, so I have no problem selling companies or shutting them down. I have no hang up over sunk costs.

(13:35):
I’ve sold and closed other companies that I’ve started—quite a few of them even—but there was one reason to keep my gym, and only one, and that is I love it, and I wanted to keep it, and that meant that I had to save it. The problem was that time wasn’t on our side. We were on a downward trajectory, and if I didn’t do anything, it would just keep getting worse. Now, if it sounds to you—if you’ve been around for a while—and this sounds to you like the same problems that I already fixed in 2008/2009, wrote a blog about for three and a half years, and then finally turned into my first book, you’re right; that was the most frustrating part to me.

(14:11):
It became clear that I wasn’t fixing my gym. The gym that I had left in 2018 was a good, solid gym. It felt like I had taken over somebody else’s gym, and I needed to rehabilitate it. So, here’s how I did it, step by step, and thanks for bearing with me through this. I know some of you longtime viewers and listeners would have been interested in that story, but if you’re just tuning in, it might sound kind of weird for the founder of Two-Brain Business to be complaining or talking about his own gym struggles. But now what I’m going to do is take those struggles and I’m going to share what I did to turn them around. Hopefully this serves as inspiration. Maybe it’s just a reminder for you, or maybe it’s even a step-by-step process to spur your own comeback. All right, here we go.

(14:55):
First, I had to really take stock. This is called the Stockdale Paradox, and it’s: You have to be absolutely clear about the reality of your situation and, at the same time, optimistic that, in the future, things are going to get better. So, the first thing that I had to do was get real. I had to cut down to bedrock. I had to ask myself, “What was solid?” Like all this stuff wasn’t working. What was working?

(15:18):
So, I made a list of the staff that I didn’t want to lose, and I did an exercise that we use in Two-Brain, called the six audits, to figure out the foundational needs. So, for example, I did a facilities audit, and I did a walkthrough, and I changed some gym light bulbs. And then I did a sales audit, and I looked at our packages, and I found like we have 76 different options in Zen Planner, somehow. Right? I found that our sales binder was completely confusing. So, I used the Two-Brain template, and I fixed our sales binder, and then I went through Zen Planner person by person. I had to learn the system all over again. I hadn’t touched it in years, and I brought it down to like five different service offerings out of 76. That was quite a job. It was not fun, but I had to bring things down to absolute solid bedrock before I could build them back up again.

(16:10):
I also found people in our system who were overdue. They owed us money. I found out that we had like a whole bunch of different invoicing, and we had cash sitting here, and we had subcontractors, coaches who hadn’t been paid on time—that we owed them money. Other people owed us money and had over-billed. Some people needed refunds and had been promised them, and so we had to audit all of that. We had to do the same thing with our expenses. We had to cut back to bedrock to like, “Okay, now we’re even. We know that our bills have been paid, we know that we’ve collected the debts, and here we are—almost like we’re starting from scratch again.”

(16:47):
So, it sounds like there’s a lot of challenges here, right, but I also had some assets. First, I had a Two-Brain Business mentor and access to all the Two-Brain resources, so I knew that when it was time to rebuild, I would be able to do that really quickly. Now, the first time I went through this gym repair with Catalyst, it took me three years because I had to build everything myself. But now I knew with Two-Brain I could do this in a few months because all the templates are there, all the strategies are there; they’re proven. It’s just cut and paste, and I knew that I could just utilize those resources for my own gym when I was ready.

(17:22):
I also had a few other assets. Number one: I had a bit of runway. I still had some cash reserves, and so I could afford to take it slow. I wasn’t desperate to make money this month or risk going bankrupt, so I knew that I still had four or five months of runway. Third, a big asset: I was confident. I’ve done it before, and while there were definitely days when I was tempted just to close or sell it, I also knew that I could do it and that the only way out of the struggle was right through the middle. And finally, I had some great coaches left.

(17:53):
I knew that I had some staff who were frustrated. They were tired; they were burned out, but they were sticking with it anyway because they believed in the mission. So, from there I found bedrock, and the next thing I had to look at was: What is salvageable here? So, I’ve got the basics down. What can be fixed? And what had to be built from scratch? Then I set a timeline. I said, “What has to be done right now? What can’t wait to be fixed?” So, one thing was change the locks on the gym. Right? There were people out there who had keys to my gym, so that had to be done right now.

(18:27):
I actually put a pause on all of my marketing because I didn’t want to bring people into a No Sweat Intro and have them meet untrained staff with old pricing, who couldn’t process their payment, and presented them with options that didn’t really even exist anymore. So, from there I had this collection of things to be fixed. And that was a big list; don’t get me wrong. But I also had a firm bedrock, and I didn’t have the pressure of a bunch of new people coming in. Now, despite all of this—turning off all of our marketing, removing calendar links—we still had people booking No Sweat Intros, and that is the power of longevity. Catalyst has just been in the market for so long—19 years now—that people still call no matter what. So, yeah, don’t let that detract from what I’m saying. The power of being around for a long time compounds.

(19:20):
So, what you’re seeing on your screen right now, if you’re watching, is a pyramid, and the pyramid is basically what you need to fix in your gym in order. And so, the foundation, of course, is your mission, like what you’re doing here. And then, on top of your mission, you build your ops to support your mission, and then, on top of your operations, you build your retention system and on top of that, you build your sales, and on top of that, you build your marketing and then, on top of that, you build your ads. But the mission is critical, and so what I did was I sat down with one or two of my coaches and I said, “What are we doing here? What’s the goal?”

(19:55):
And they said, “We’d really like to know—are we having a meaningful impact here? Like, are we actually changing people’s lives?” And so we set the goal to change the lives—to extend the lifespan and the health span of 10% of our city, so that’s about 7,000 people, and we said, “Okay, if we’re going to be here for 30 years, how many people do we have to serve at one time?” And especially given that we don’t change everybody’s life the first day; we want to keep them around for about two years. People who have left my gym after two years did not quit exercise. They might have quit Catalyst, but they kept exercising. Maybe they went to another gym, maybe they started cycling or swimming or whatever. So, two years—to me we’ve changed their life. So, you know, that was kind of the goal. Okay, well, we’re going to have 150 clients, we’re going to have a LEG, length of engagement, of 24 months, and that means that determines what our rate needed to be. So, from there we could say, “Okay, well, here are our prices,” and it was nice to kind of start from scratch here but still find out that we weren’t too far off. Our prices had to come up a little bit, mostly because there’s been some inflation and some expenses since the last time we set our rates, but it wasn’t too scary.

(21:06):
From there we had our mission, and I actually—just to set it in stone—I produced a YouTube video, and you can go look for the Catalyst Method on YouTube, and you’ll see our mission video. Then it was time to build up our ops. So, the mission was one conversation. Everybody was fired up. That gave us the energy for the journey ahead.

(21:23):
But then I had to rebuild ops from scratch. I took our playbook, which hadn’t been updated since 2016. I fixed it step by step. I got all of our staff on contracts. I got our staff’s CPR and first aid certification updated. I updated our insurance. I used all Two-Brain Business templates. So, this happened super fast, like less than two weeks.

(21:46):
Then I decided to stick with the mantra less but better. So, we went with fewer options, and I’ll walk through those in a moment. I audited my expenses. I cut the stuff that we weren’t using every day. I think we had an app for online coaching, Zoom meetups. We downgraded some accounts. I removed some certain expenses, including the fixed salary of my GM. We just decided that at this stage, we were not ready to have a general manager, and so I broke the general manager into six different roles and split those up, and I’ll get to those in a moment. We ended our kids’ program. We put it on a three-month hiatus because it was just a mess and completely disorganized, but we kept our prime program for people over 55 because that was running really smoothly.

(22:31):
We started semi-private, so I wanted fewer but better coaches, and instead of hiring a bunch more personal trainers, we started building a semi-private program instead. We changed the goal of our No Sweat Intro to just sell On-Ramp. Don’t present any option other than that. Then, after their On-Ramp, they’ll do a goal review, and then they’ll get their first prescription for personal training, semi-private, or group. I systemized everything based on these decisions.

(22:56):
After I had written everything down in a new staff playbook, I sent that to every staff person on the team. I got every staff person their own email address, I got them their own playbook, and I wrote new contracts. Then I found a few places where I could optimize roles. So, I brought in an outside bookkeeper, and I trained them on Zen Planner. I brought in one coach to get trained on GLM, just to do lead nurture. I trained another coach just on NSIs. I made them experts. I brought in a separate bookkeeper just to do our books every month and give me an updated P&L, so I could see what was happening with these changes.

(23:32):
And finally, I cut some staff—not to save money but to give more work to the best. Now, I didn’t have enough staff; I had to hire someone. I had a lot of coaches doing two, three sessions or classes a week, and I really wanted to focus on having one or two great coaches who were doing this and nothing else. So, I knew that I had to hire somebody. The staff was amazing. They were willing to help and pitch in, but I wanted somebody who I knew was going to be there and flexible. So, this took me about three months.

(24:03):
We started posting job ads in different places. If you’re in Canada, you’re familiar with the federal Job Bank, the provincial job banks. I posted them on local bulletin boards, and I was just getting nothing. I was on LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, and then, finally, I posted the exact same ad on a different community services board, and I got seven great applicants. And what I learned from that is that a job ad—where you’re hiring—is a lot like a Facebook ad. A little change makes a massive difference. Putting it in front of a different audience is huge. Tweaking the copy is huge. Don’t give up just because the first time you try an ad it doesn’t give you who you want. So, this ad finally worked, and within two weeks, I got seven really great applicants.

(24:47):
I knew that I only needed one, and maybe I would kind of keep one on a back burner. But I hired the first one that I interviewed; he’s amazing. And then I sent the other resumes to the other Two-Brain gym in town, which is two blocks from me, and said, “Hey, here they are.” So, I contacted the applicants first and said, “Hey, I’m full. Thank you for applying. Your resume looks great. Do you mind if I pass it on to another local gym owner who’s a friend of mine?” And I did that, and that helped plug his gaps too, which was a great win. And the lesson there is: Always be hiring; you need to set up a staff pipeline, just like a client pipeline.

(25:21):
So, my lowest point in this whole process—and this was months long; it was a great lesson. I was hauling garbage—old shoes and cardboard boxes and lost and found crap—out of my sales office, and I was in a very bad mood while I was doing it. I was sweaty, filthy; I did not want to be there, and a coach stopped by. You know, he opened up the door of the office, he came in, he said hello, and he just like set his smelly shoes down on the shelf behind the desk that I had just cleaned. He did it right in front of me, and it hit me that giving people the rules in the playbook wasn’t enough—that I had to communicate the rules to them and share why we were bringing everything up to the 10 out of 10 level again, and I needed to repeat it and repeat it, and repeat it. And so, what I started doing was going through the staff handbook and recording a two-minute video on a different part every day, and so I would email every staff a copy of that video every day with the staff handbook attached, and I would post a video in our private coaches’ Facebook group every single day.

(26:24):
Day one: Here’s how you open a gym. Here’s where the checklist is. Here I am walking in the door. Here’s the light switch. Okay. Why we turn on all the lights when we do. Here is where you turn on the radio. Here’s where the volume level should be set. Here’s where you put the volume to when the met-con is going. Here’s the station that you use. Here’s how you enter a sale. Here’s how you close the batch. Here’s what to do if the cleaner doesn’t show up. And this went on for weeks. I would record five or six at a time and then schedule them to post through email and into our coaches’ Facebook group.

(26:54):
Then I turned to retention. So, my big move in retention was to simplify things. I didn’t want any confusing layers of heart-rate monitoring and, you know. So, I put Level Method on hold for a while, while we just re-sorted the groups and got them fun again. I started to referring to our group classes as CrossFit again. We went to NCFIT programming. We basically stopped making these quick moves that were shaking clients off because they didn’t know what the heck we were doing. We started following “Bright Spots Friday,” something that’s been core to Catalyst for 18 years, and there’s more. But I didn’t want to plan out a long client journey until I had some new clients in the pipeline, and so I used the Two-Brain On-Ramp builder, and I rebuilt our On-Ramp to be simpler, and then I taught it to my coaches.

(27:39):
I took them through the On-Ramp, so they could deliver it without me. Then I turned to sales, the next level of the pyramid. I rebuilt our packages to be simpler: semi-private, private, and group. That’s it. I simplified our sales binder from the Two-Brain template. I put our head coach into mentorship, so she would get some lead nurture training and some sales training. And now I knew that if somebody came in, we could sign them up, and I could count on that without being the one to do all the NSIs myself. Then I turned to marketing, the next level of the pyramid, and I asked myself not “What’s the newest thing for marketing?” but “What has worked for me in the past?”

(28:14):
For me, it’s always been blog posts and emails. I started my gym on a newsletter. I had a bunch of emails, and I’d email them every Friday. Then I turned to a blog. Then people would find me through Google search. Then I started emailing my blog to my list every day, and I built that list and built that list and built that list. So, I went back to that—blogs and emails. I left our ads turned off, and I started writing to my list more. I cut off most of my automations, except the ones that I knew were like the bare bones, and I got to be honest: I’ve been blogging on that gym site for 19 years, and so even when I had all of our marketing shut off, we were still getting people booking like one or two NSIs a week just because of that legacy of content. So, after the marketing, I turned to ads—the top of the pyramid—and with the help of a Two-Brain mentor, I got our ads back up and running, and that started the leads flowing at a faster rate. But again, I didn’t do that until every step of the funnel was fixed, and the pyramid was solid with a good bedrock, a good product, a good intake process, good retention, and now good marketing.

(29:18):
Look, it’s going to be a 20-mile march. The beautiful thing is that time wasn’t on our side, and now it is. If we just keep doing the things that we’re doing, Catalyst will continue to grow again. The 20-mile march is basically like we don’t just shoot for $80,000 or $72,000; we don’t try to get right back there again. What we do is we take it month by month. We try to grow by a couple of thousand dollars every single month. We just keep doing the things that we know work. We avoid the distraction of stuff that could distract us, the superfluous stuff. We focus on better, not more or fewer, but better. And that’s what it’s going to take to get back.

(29:58):
I’m committed. I know that I can’t work even five hours a week in my gym because of Two-Brain. I love Two-Brain so much, and I love helping your gyms, and that is a full-time job. We have over 70 staff worldwide, 950 gyms in the program, massive alumni; Gym Owners United has 8,000 gyms in it. That is my passion, and that’s where I want to focus. But I love my gym, and I love that while Catalyst was the subject of my first book and the source of all those mistakes that I made in the first book, 10 years later, Two-Brain Business has evolved, so it’s not about my gym anymore, and it saved my gym instead.

(30:38):
I’m Chris Cooper. I hope this podcast has been helpful to you and not just this big rambling monologue. If you’re in Two-Brain and you want to ask questions, we’ll do an open office hour, so that we can talk through this again. If you’re not in Two-Brain, go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free group. We try to be as specific and helpful as we possibly can in there. We’re constantly doing webinars, giving you free action guides that you can take with no commitment, and connecting you with other gym owners who can help you. Thanks for listening to “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m Chris Cooper. Get time on your side, and we’ll see you as you grow.

The post How Chris Cooper Saved His Own Gym in 2023 appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Break Down and Solve Every Problem in Your Gym

Chris Cooper (00:02):
Mentors have a lot of skills. One of those skills is breaking problems down. So, you take a big, overwhelming problem like, “Oh my goodness. What do I do about this bad coach, or how do I get more leads?” and you break that problem down into smaller and more achievable steps. This is something that we train our mentors on that they do every single day with the 950 gyms in Two-Brain, and we’ve done with 3,000 gyms around the world. It’s an amazing skill. As a fitness coach, you might actually recognize this skill because you probably do it with the clients in your gym. So today, we’re going to walk through this process. I’m going to teach you how to do it so that you can help get some more traction and grow your gym. 

(00:41):
I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today we’re going to do this in three parts. First, I’m going to share the example of what to do if you have a bad coach or a coach who needs to be fixed or a staff member, and you’re not sure what to do there. Second, I’m going to help you break down the problem of “I’m not getting enough leads” because we hear that a ton. And third, I’m going to help you break down the problem of “My gym just isn’t paying me enough. I’m not making enough money at this.” So, these are going from simple to complex problems. Of course, there are a thousand different problems that you need to overcome when you’re building your gym, and if you want to access our free help, go to gymownersunited.com. There are 8,000 gym owners in that group, including me and our team of mentors, and we are there to help gyms for free because we want to see you succeed and change more lives. So, the first thing that we’re going to do is talk about why gyms struggle and fail, and the real reason is that most gym owners are just plagued by overwhelm. They’re like Barry—they’ve got so many problems to solve; they don’t know where to start, and so the first thing that our mentor team is trained to do is identify the lead domino. What is the biggest problem, which fixing will have a tremendous impact on all the problems downstream? And this involves some auditing, some cutting. 

(01:56):
I’m going to walk through these examples with you today. I’m going to show you some of the tools that we use so that you can do this on your own. All right, so let’s start with this. Problem number one: I’ve got this bad coach. I’ve got this bad staff person, right. This coach might not be a bad person, but they’re not delivering at the level that you want. I know this is really, really common for gym owners, and we’re always tempted to just like jump in and do the thing ourselves. “Nobody can do it as well as I do.” Well, the reason that nobody can do it as well as you do is because you’ve got one of two problems: Either you’ve got a process problem, or you’ve got a people problem. 

(02:34):
So, what I’ve done here is drawn two axes. The x-axis is the person: Are they the problem? And the y-axis is the process: Is the process the problem? Do they not know what to do? So, let’s talk about how to determine whether you have a process or a people problem. 

(02:51):
So, I live by this adage: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance.” In most cases, it’s not that the person is doing a bad job, or they’re lazy, or they’re Gen Z, or whatever. It’s that they don’t actually know what to do. Right, all the instructions are up here, and they can’t read our mind. So, if you’re saying something like this, “My staff never cleans up before they go home. Our front office is a pigsty,” or “Nobody on my team returns calls or emails quickly enough,” or even “Nobody cares except for me.” If you struggle to get consistent action from your staff with excellence, then the first probable cause is your process. Let’s try and solve that first, and the second probable cause is your people. So, here’s some questions that I want you to ask because we’re going to break this problem down and identify the solution. So, if anybody on my staff is failing to perform at the highest level, then I first assume it’s my fault. Okay. The process isn’t clear enough, and so I ask myself: Have I told them exactly what to do and exactly how to do it?

(03:52):
So, as founders, we frequently assume that everybody knows what we do, right? We project knowledge onto them—but that’s not the case. Nobody knows how to write a good quote or do a good Instagram post until we tell them. They don’t have that experience, and often our instructions are just way too complex, or maybe they’re too vague, like, “Hey, clean up before you go home.” Well, nobody knows what that means because their definition of clean is different from your definition of clean. I once had this this cleaner named Sean, and his checklist said, “Mop the floors,” and so he did. But he didn’t use any soap to mop the floors because I didn’t write, “Pour a cup of soap in the mop bucket before you mop the floors.” He just didn’t know any better. So, the dirty floors were actually my fault. Right? Sean was just following my poor directions. So, you just have to understand: If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist. And you might think like, “Well, everybody knows that,” but you can’t assume that anybody knows anything. 

(04:48):
Here’s the second question that might indicate to you that you’ve got a process problem and not a people problem. If I’ve told the staff clearly how to do the job, and they’re not meeting the expectations, then the question that I ask myself is: Have I shown them what perfect means? Do they know what a 10 out of 10 is? Is their definition of clean the same as mine? Do they know what a perfect class looks like? Do they know what a 10 out of 10 personal training session is? Do they know how often they need to be following up with a nutrition client to make this a 10 out of 10 experience and get the client results? Do they know how often a client should do a goal review, and why? 

(05:25):
Okay, so my definition of clean is different from your definition. To my kids, clean means tidy, right? To my wife, clean usually involves bleach and rubber gloves. But to me, on time means 15 minutes early. That’s how I was raised. Maybe that’s how you were raised, but to a teenager, on time means two minutes after nine. And if my front desk staff arrives at two minutes after nine on the weekend, and I’ve told them to be on time, then I’m allowing my subjective experience into the process. So, I need to fix the process. You need to tell them be here by 8:45. So, you need to clearly spell out the gold standard in every prescription that you make to yourself, your staff.

(06:08):
Every piece of information, every instruction that you give them, you have to say, “Here’s what perfect looks like.” I’ll give you a tip here: This is where you can use like photo or video cues. So, when I’m doing an SOP like, “How to open the gym in the morning,” I give everybody the checklist, and then I take my camera and I walk into the gym in the morning. I’m flipping on the lights. Now, I’m turning on the radio. Here’s what the key is, etcetera. Okay? You need to show them what a 10 out of 10 looks like. Clearly spell out that gold standard. 

(06:35):
Now if they know the gold standard and they have clear directions, and they’re still failing to achieve it, then I ask myself a third question, which is: Have I reviewed their performance with them? In other words, do they know how they’re actually doing? This is usually the weakest link for me. People think they’re doing a 10 out of 10 job, or at least a B+, but really they’re like a C- because I haven’t told them. So, if I haven’t told the staff person that their work is subpar, they probably think it’s just fine because “nobody’s telling me any different; nobody’s brought it up.” 

(07:06):
Over 80% of the drivers that are out there on the road, for example, think that they are above average, and that’s because our egos don’t let us believe that we’re bad at anything. Your staff is the same way. If you don’t rate their performance and tell them how they’re doing, they’ll assume it’s good enough. So, you’ve got to schedule quarterly reviews for your staff. Do it before there’s a problem, and then give them the scorecard every time, and also give them a blank scorecard on the day they’re hired, so they’ll know how they’ll be evaluated, and they’ll know what a 10 out of 10 is. All right. So, here’s question four: If they know what to do, if they know how to do it—clearly they have a good picture of like 10 out of 10—they know what done means, and they’re being evaluated, and they’re still failing, then I’m going to ask myself question number four, and that is: Do they have an emotional reason to succeed?

(07:54):
So, if you tell a staff person to take out the garbage because it’s their job, then you can impose authority and threaten punishment. And with very low-level staff, that might be good enough, right? For somebody who works at KFC, “Do it, or else” is good enough. But you know, at 9 p.m., when you’re not watching and the cleaner is pretty tired, and they want to make it home in time to watch “Survivor,” they might skip a step or two; they might round off the corners. Right? It might not even be a conscious decision; they’re just rushing, or they’re tired. But if they know that you’re visiting tomorrow, and tomorrow is the day that you’re going to audit how clean the gym is, then they’re not going to forget. So, our job is to make them see the consequences of their action. 

(08:35):
But more than that, when you have important, high-level, smart, caring staff, they need to know why. So, if your coaches are taking out your garbage, they need to know why it’s important that the garbage is taken out, so that tomorrow at 6 a.m. when Mary shows up to coach, everything is bright and clean, and she doesn’t have to worry about clients getting a wrong impression, and they can focus on their workout and get better results. Okay, so you need to ask your staff, “How will this affect the other staff if you don’t do your work?” or “What impression do you think our clients are going to have if the entryway—the lobby—is dirty?” or even, “What do you think that that person will think if you don’t spell their name correctly in Zen Planner?” Okay. Or “How are they going to feel if you don’t enter them in the workout tracking software right away, and you leave it for a few days, and they show up and they’re not entered, and everybody else is putting their scores?” They’re going to feel like an outsider. They’re not going to feel good. All right. 

(09:29):
So, now the other option here is that you’ve got the wrong person doing the wrong job. All right? Now, if you’re trying to hurriedly write down these questions, don’t worry, I’m going to have them in a blog post for you later this week. So it could be that you’ve got the right person after all, right? And you just don’t have a good process for them, which means that, they’re going to fail, and it’s going to be your fault. So that’s this square. If you’ve got a tight process and you’ve got the right person, they’re going to be a 10 out of 10. There’s no problem to solve. Okay, they’re up here. However, what happens if you’ve got, like, the wrong person? And how do you know? Well, I’m going to ask myself another few questions. 

(10:12):
So, first question is: Do they have a clear view of their future in the company? Is there a future for them? Have they run out of future? Do they think like, “Well, this is the highest level I’m ever going to achieve here.” Do they see how being good in their current role will affect their opportunities later? Do they even have opportunities later? Do they think that they’re going to be stuck mopping the floors for life and being the backup coach? Or do they know that eventually, you’re going to try and get them up to at least a part-time role or a full-time role as, like, a lead coach? Do they know that there’s a GM position available down the track or an admin? Or do they know that there might be a head coach? Or do they know that someday maybe you might even open a second gym? Now, I will caution you: Don’t make big promises until they’re imminent. Okay, like, “Hey, if you do a good job here, someday we’re going to open up our own gym,” and three years down the track, they’re going to feel misled if you don’t do that. Okay. So, the first question is: Do they have a clear view of their future in the company? Second question: Does their future position depend on success in this position? 

(11:15):
So, you might hire somebody because they’re going to be a good manager, and they’ve got managerial skills, but the only work you’ve got for them right now is coaching, and they’re a crummy coach. Do they have to be a good coach to be promoted to manager later? I don’t know. Or maybe it’s the inverse: You hire them to be an admin because you don’t have any coaching work for them. They only want to coach. But does their skill as an admin reflect on their chances to be a coach later? 

(11:41):
You know where this comes up a lot is you hire somebody for a specialty program. Like you hire them to be your kid’s coach, and really, they want to be a group class coach. So, at first they’re doing a good job being a kid’s coach, but then eventually they’re like, “Well, I don’t know; maybe I’ll get the class coach for adults job anyway.” Does this job that they’re doing reflect on their chances to get that higher level job later? You’ve got to ask yourself that, and you have to make it clear to them whether it does or does not. And so, here’s my third question—this is the highest one of all: Will this person be part of the team that takes us to the next level? 

(12:17):
So, if I’ve got somebody and they’re kind of a C+ player, and I’m keeping them on staff anyway because, well, you know, they fill a hole, or they’ve got a few clients who really like them, or nobody else wants to coach at six a.m. The question that I ask myself is: Is this person part of the team that can take us to the next level or not? Right? Because the people who got you here to this level might not be the same people who get you to that level. That’s a very tough question to ask yourself. It’s true of your staff, but it’s also true of you: Are you the person that can take this company to the next level? Yet, in many cases, that’s the biggest holdup, and that’s where a mentor, in many cases, has to spend a lot of time. So, after they’ve broken down this problem and solved the staff problem, they might realize the biggest roadblock to the gym’s growth is the entrepreneur. And they might take the approach of “fix the entrepreneur, fix the business,” and that’s another topic. 

(13:10):
But the reality here is that when you’re trying to grow, and you’ve got three coaches who are mediocre and three who are really good, and you’re pumping new people into your gym, and they choose the class that’s coached by the mediocre person, you’re going to lose that person. That person cannot be part of the team that takes you to the next level, and bad staff can hold you back. So, when your staff isn’t living up to your expectations, first you’ve got to assume that you’ve got a process problem. If you fix that process, you’re golden because that solves your people problem. But if you’ve got the wrong person and you’ve got a good process—everybody else is following the process; this person is not, or this person is following it poorly, or even with the process, they’re just not delivering well—then they’ve got to go because they’re going to hold your gym back. So where does the problem lie? If it’s a process problem and your processes are all in your heads, then you are the problem, and we need to get those processes out of your heads. If you’ve got clear processes and somebody’s not following them, or they’re not motivated—or, worse, they’re burnt out, sarcastic, angry—then they are the problem, and they’ve got to go. 

(14:20):
So, this podcast is about identifying the problems, breaking them down. A mentor is really the person that’s going to help you solve these problems and take the next steps. There are obviously solutions to all these problems, no matter what they are, and the mentor’s job is to break them down into small, solvable steps. So now, I want to go back to the next big problem that we see from gyms: I’m not getting any leads. Right? Maybe this is you. And so, the first thing that we want to do as a mentor is we actually want to start by breaking down your funnel. Right? We want to audit things. We want to pick the question apart and break it down into smaller, solvable problems. When a lot of gym owners say, “I’m not getting enough leads,” what they mean is that they’re not getting enough people signed up, so we’re going to actually audit the entire funnel. Now, if you’re very familiar with marketing and you know that leads are the problem, then we can break that down even more, right? Like, where are the leads coming from? Why are they not converting? How do we ramp up leads? For today—because the vast majority of people who say that they’re not getting enough leads are confused about what a lead actually means—we’re going to break that down and audit your funnel, but I think this is going to be valuable, no matter who you are. 

(15:32):
So, in Two-Brain Business, we help gym owners build four different funnels. One of those funnels is ads. Not everybody runs ads, but most gyms should be running some kind of ads in the background. The most important thing, though, is that you have marketing funnels in place, and you can use this same audit on any of your funnels and all of them. Okay. Because it’s important. The stages don’t really change; what changes is where your clients are coming from. 

(15:55):
Okay, so four funnels. Ads are one funnel. Here’s how you audit your ads: First off, we have to know are you running ads, and are you running them at a minimum level? Okay, at least like five bucks a day. You have to be running them at a minimum level so that the algorithm can learn and keep getting better, and you’re getting enough leads coming into your funnel that the pixel sees who they are and can retarget. All right. 

(16:22):
The other thing too is if you’re putting out one ad, trying it, putting 50 bucks behind it, you’re not really running ads. Ads are a science, not an art. Back in the old days, the marketing department was the art department. They would design a beautiful billboard, and they’d put it up, and it would work or not, and nobody could measure. Now, it’s a science. So now you build three ads, you run them all for 30 days, you take the one that’s performing best, and you double down on that one, and you keep that one running while you test different stuff off to the side. And you take a “bullets before cannonballs” approach. You spend a little bit on ads until they prove that they’re working, and then you fire the cannonball, and you go all in on those ads. So, the $5 a day minimum is a good level to test ads at. Once they’re working, though, you might want to invest more because then you’ve got a machine that really works. 

(17:12):
So, the first thing that we want to know is: Are you generating leads through your ads funnel? This is, again, not the only way to generate leads, but this is how you would audit all of your marketing. The next thing that you want to see is: Down the funnel, what happens to those leads? Okay, so I’ve got a contact form here, but really the point is: Do you have a website that converts leads—like somebody coming from Facebook, or your content, or your email list, whatever—into appointments? Okay? Are they booking an NSI from your website? 

(17:48):
A lot of people will say, “I’m not getting enough leads,” when really they’re getting leads from Facebook, but those leads don’t go anywhere. They can’t move down the funnel, so think about this as, like Facebook and this as your site. The lead hits your site, but they don’t know how to book an appointment, so they don’t go anywhere, or maybe your site just sucks. The point, though, is that—like I said—ads are a science. That site should have a pixel on it that knows who’s coming there, and then that pixel informs how you set up your next Facebook ads. If this is Greek to you, don’t worry, our mentors will teach you exactly how to do it in our program. So, the site needs to convert people from, “Hey, I’m interested. I click the link on Facebook,” to “I’m going to book an appointment now.” Okay, so that NSI is going to be the bottom of your funnel. That’s a No Sweat Intro. That’s your sales appointment. 

(18:41):
What happens between them booking an appointment and then showing up for the appointment is called lead nurture. Okay, so they’re on your website, they click a link, book an appointment. They’re like, “Yeah, I’m interested.” Okay, click: They book the appointment. But then doubt starts to set in. So, you know, do they hear from you again? If they book the appointment more than two days away, they’re kind of like, “I don’t know. I’m nervous. I’m not sure this is for me.” Or maybe they’re looking through your other Instagram account and they’re like, “Wow, that that dude is not for me. You know, he’s not talking about fitness; he’s talking about politics for some reason, or like weird football references. I don’t know. This dude is not for me, I’m out.” Lead nurture is basically like you grabbing their hand after they book their appointment and then just holding their hand until they show up for their NSI. And then, finally, the last thing is we want to know: Are you actually signing people up after they come in for their NSI? 

(19:35):
So, we measure these differently, and when we’re doing a funnel audit, we use a bunch of different metrics. So, the first metric that we’re going to use is just leads: How many leads are you actually generating? How many people are seeing your ad on Facebook, Instagram, whatever, and clicking it? That’s it. The next one we want to do is what we call set rate. So, how many of the people who click the link on Instagram, or Facebook, or whatever book an appointment with you? Okay, out of the people who book an appointment with you, how many of those show up? We call that show rate. And then, of those people who show up, how many buy? We call that a close rate. Okay, now here’s why this is important: 

(20:18):
People will say, “I’m not getting enough leads,” but the reality is like they might actually be getting enough leads. So, let’s say they get 100 leads a month. That’s more than enough. But if none of those leads fill out a contact form and book an NSI, then your ad money is wasted. If none of the people who book an NSI actually show up, then your ad money is still wasted. And if none of those people who show up actually buy from you, then your ad money is still wasted. 

(20:42):
So, the problem of “I’m not getting enough leads” might actually be one of four problems. It could be lead gen, it could be that you don’t have a website that converts, it could be that you’re not doing enough lead nurture or, worse, that you’re turning people off before they actually show up, and it could be that you can’t close the leads that you have. So, then, what we’re going to do as a mentor is we’re going to look at your metrics, and we’ve got industry averages. Here’s the average. We’ve got Two-Brain averages, which are even better. We want to find out where you are at each metric, and say, “Let’s improve that.” So, for example, if you’re getting good leads and you’ve got a website with a good contact form, and you’ve got a good show rate—most of the people who book an appointment actually show up—but your close rate is like one out of 10, then your mentor is going to help you improve that close rate first because everything else is working. It’s just, you know, you’ve got like a plugged funnel right here, so let’s fix that. If, though, your close rate is good, your lead nurture seems to be good—you know, 600 to 10 show up, 800 to 10 show up—you’ve got a good lead converting website—great, you know, there’s a certain metric for that—then we’re going to look at your ads. 

(21:49):
And if we need to improve your ads, then we’re going to look at your ad copy. Maybe it needs a refresh. “Here’s what’s working in other markets.” Maybe we need to increase your ad spend. That happens sometimes, right? Maybe we need to narrow your parameters. Maybe we need to fix your pixels so that you’re retargeting the right people. Maybe you need a different type of ad. 

(22:09):
But now you know what to do, and you’ve broken the problem down, and it’s not just this big messy morass of overwhelm anymore. So, you know, you could do this same test for referrals. That’s another funnel that we teach is referrals. Okay, so you could do a referral funnel. We have one for organic social media content. We have one for big content, like blog and YouTube and podcast, and you can audit all of those, and say, “Why am I not getting leads?” But you’re no longer just left in the dark or wondering, “Why am I not getting leads? Oh, my goodness.” And you’re no longer tempted to go out and hire that agency that’s promising you 100 free leads on Facebook or whatever. Because now you know how to solve your own problems and how to take the steps to resolve them. The specifics: How do I get more leads? What copy should I change to? We resolve that in our mentorship program. We’ve got a massive toolkit of plug and play tools that you would use for all those. Right now, you’re figuring out, like, what play should I call? Okay.

(23:08):
Now, the last question that I want to bring up today because we do get this a lot is: “I’m just not making enough money,” and this is the meta problem. Right? And you need to break that down too. So today, what we’re going to actually do is I’m going to show you an annual plan example. I’m going to show you what we do every single year. So, when people come into our mentorship program, my first goal, honestly, is to increase their client value and to make them some money. I want them to get a really quick ROI so that they’ve got a bright spot, and they’ve got some energy and some momentum. So, the first thing we’re going to do is give them a bit of a catalyst—a little boost. 

(23:43):
The next thing that we’re going to do is remove roadblocks. Like, what is actually stopping you? And part of that plan is to actually set some goals and work backward from those goals to make a plan. So, the first thing that you need to do if you’re not making enough money is set a goal. Like, how much money do you need to make? Right? Let’s be really, really clear about that. So, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to share with you our goal-setting template. Now, this is something that we use inside Two-Brain. We don’t publish this publicly, but you’re going to get to see it, and you can either build your own, or when we do a goal-setting webinar in Gym Owners United, you can work through that with me. So, when we’re working through this, this is done step by step with a mentor because spreadsheets are daunting. A lot of people get overwhelmed. A few of us love spreadsheets, but most people do not want to spend hours figuring them out. 

(24:34):
So, we’re going to do an exercise called “Your Perfect Day,” and I want you to close your eyes and imagine you’re having the best day of your life. Right? What time do you get up? What’s the first thing that you do? How much do you work at your gym, etcetera? Then we’re going to clearly think: What kind of income is necessary to support that lifestyle that you’re having on your perfect day? Every time you do this exercise, every year you’ll get better and better, and you’ll refine the numbers, but for most people they’ll say that $100,000 per year income will supply their perfect day. It might be more if you’re in Manhattan. It might be less if you’re in Sault Ste. Marie, where I am. Right? Like, the average household income here is now about $78,000. That’s an amazing income here. That’s not for everybody. We want you to set your goal, not my goal. 

(25:21):

Then we want you to say, okay, like you’re living that perfect day, but there’s probably other things that you’re going to spend money on that you didn’t spend money on this year. Like, what are you going to invest in your education? What are you going to invest in travel? Do you have to upgrade your home next year? What will you buy for your family next year? Do you need to get a new car? Like, what is the total car payment on that new car? So, let’s say that we’re going to buy a minivan next year, and if I look at the monthly payments, those payments are going to be like $9,000 total for the year. All right. Then what we’re going to do—will I donate money? I do at my level. But if you’re not making $100,000 a year yet, focus on your income before you worry about donations and investments. All right. 

(26:02):
Then what we’re going to do is say: Okay, what’s our staff pay at the gym? What are our recurring expenses? What are our one-time expenses? And what this is going to do is take your goal from a personal income goal to the revenue goal that the gym needs to make to pay you that much money. So, let’s say that I need to cover like $65,000 in staff expenses for a full-time coach, whatever that is. Then, I’ve got recurring expenses. I know what this is; this is about $132,000 a year, just using my gym numbers, and then one-time expenses—I do tend to buy toys. Boy, we could do a podcast on that, couldn’t we? And so now what we’ve got here is this total of: I need to do $316,000 in gross revenue per year. Now, these numbers are high. I’m going through this really quickly, but you can see that’s my revenue goal for the month: $26,333. 

(26:51):
The next thing that I’m going to do is get really specific. Like, where’s that money coming from? So, what percentage of my revenue comes from group classes? For me, that’s only about 25%. You can say it’s more. What percentage of my revenue comes from private or semi-private? That’s a lot more. That’s actually like 55% of our rev. What percentage of our revenue comes from nutrition coaching? That’s pretty low. That’s about 10%—still better than the average. And what percentage comes from other—competitions, online training? There you go; it’s 100%. So now what I’ve got is I’ve got specific goals for each thing. 

(27:27):
Group classes: I know that I need to make 6,500 in revenue from group classes. Ah, piece of cake—like, we’re way above that. Next, I need to make 14,000 from personal training. Okay, we need to bring that up a little bit, right? So, you can already see how working through this is getting me a lot of clarity. Oh, how are we going to make that much from personal training with the staff that we have? Maybe we need to look at semi-private, etcetera. All right.

(27:52):
Then I can say, “All right; we can break this down into monthly targets.” So, here’s the monthly targets, and this is just automatically carried forward from setting goals. So, if I need to sell 6,500 dollars in group class membership—so my average group class membership is 150 dollars—then I need to sell 44 group memberships. I’m already way above that—high five, okay. So how many people do I already have? I know it’s like way more than that. I’m just going to put a number in. Let’s say that I have 50. Boom, all right. 

(28:24):
So now what I can say is: Here’s how many people I need to be paying that amount. And then I can say: How many new people, and how many current clients do I have? Well, if I’ve got 50 current clients, you know, I don’t need to get any new ones—it’s minus six. But if I change that goal—like I want 15,000 a month in revenue at 150,000—then I need 100. I currently have 50; I need 50 new, which means that I need to get about four new per month. Right? Maybe five if that rounds up, and I can do the same calculation for each thing. So now what I’m doing is I’m getting super-duper granular and, again, the point is not to guide you through this, it’s to demonstrate how you take an overwhelming goal like, “How do I make more money?” and you break that down into “I need to get four new clients per month.” 

(29:10):
Okay, now what? Well, we know that we need to get four new clients per month. How are we going to do that? There’s lots of strategies. There’s advertising; there’s referrals. We teach all this stuff in Two-Brain, and this is the point where a mentor would say, “Okay, look. Here’s all the different ways that we can get four new people a month.”

(29:30):
Okay, I actually wasn’t planning on doing this, but I’m just going to show you just a big overview of our toolkit so you can see. All we’ve got to do is pick one of these tactics and just execute on it. So, what I’ve done here is just logged into the Two-Brain app really quickly to show you, like, if I need to get four group clients per month, I have a lot of options to do that. Right, I can audit my funnels and see which one’s going to be the easiest for me. I can follow any of the instructions in this toolkit. I can do affinity marketing. I can do social media. I can start a podcast if I want to. I can focus on Google Ads. I can use AI. You know, I can do referral partnerships. I can work on SEO. 

(30:09):
You and your mentor should determine, like, exactly what that process is going to be, but then, when I open up any one of these tools, it’s going to give me this step by step by step “here’s exactly what you do.” And in most cases, like if you go to Facebook and Instagram advertising, it’s going to say here’s the ad copy to use, here’s the photos to use, here’s how to book a call with a mentor who’s a specialist in this. Like, the content vault has well over 2,000 blog posts, Instagram, Facebook posts, emails, swipe photos, graphics that you can use: Everything is right there. 

(30:40):
But the key, though, is that we need to be breaking down the problems into very specific metrics first, so that we can see, “Okay, here’s our goal: four.” Right? I mean, if all I did was give you that goal, and say, “Hey, how would you get four new clients a month?” I mean, you can probably even take it from there with your own goals and experience and knowledge. The key, though, is to be breaking these problems down so that they become solvable. If I said, “How are you going to make more profit next year? Go,” you’d probably struggle to give me a good answer. But if I said, “How would you get four more clients next month?” you’d have a better answer. And if I said, “How would you ask clients for referrals next month?” you’d probably have an even better answer. Right? The key is breaking the big problems down into very specific things. Here’s the key points I want you to take away: 

(31:25):
You can solve any problem in your business by breaking it down far enough. First, all you got to do is identify the problem. Then, if you can split the problem into its parts—by asking why or by asking what is halfway to the solution—you can find the first step that you should take toward getting that problem solved. You can identify when you’re being successful. Obviously, a mentor is great at this, and we do so much training on this, but what I really want to do here is just give you one more tool that maybe is going to help you, and this is our problem breakdown. So here we go. I’m going to share this with you. 

(32:02):
This is called breaking down the problem. So, the first thing that you want to do is write down a goal. Okay so—and the bottom line here—you might say, “I want to do another $5,000 per month.” So, you would write down that goal. Then what you do is you break it down. So, what’s halfway to that goal? $2,500 a month. What’s halfway to that halfway point? $1,250 a month. What’s halfway to that? $615 a month. Okay, so you’re going to write down $615 a month. How are you going to make another $615 a month? 

(32:33):
You’ve got a couple of different options, right? You could raise rates on people. You could run in one specialty group—like adding a kids’ group would do that, no problem. If your memberships are 150 bucks, then selling like four of those solves your problem. The key, though, is that we’re breaking this down to a level that’s tactical and actionable, so that you can feel like you’re getting some momentum instead of just feeling overwhelmed all the time, which is what most people feel. 

(32:57):
So, this is “Run A Profitable Gym.” I’m Chris Cooper. Thanks for listening. If you want to talk about stuff like this more, join our Gym Owners United group today. Just go to gymownersunited.com. That’s where I answer questions, and we do free webinars, and we give you free tools like this all the time—just to grow your gym because that’s our mission. So, gymownersunited.com, join today. I hope this helps you solve problems and plan for the future and grow your gym and help more people. 

The post How to Break Down and Solve Every Problem in Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The 4 Personalities in Your Gym—and 1 Huge Mistake

“Fine. Do whatever you want.”

I said that once to a client who was pushing back on the load I recommended for the next set.

I regret saying it, and I probably could have avoided the situation if I had read Chris Cooper’s new guide on the four personalities you’ll find in a gym.

Coop’s newest free resource lays out four personality types and explains how to sell to them, coach them, and lead them.

You can request the guide in the Gym Owners United group.

Had I read the guide, I would have realized my client was a fact-based introvert, and I could have taken a different approach with her.

She was intense and analytical. She wanted data and explanations. And she had her own opinions on loading because she had read all kinds of articles. She was an introvert, so she wasn’t totally sure how to communicate all that, and her pushback came off as hostile when I gave her an instruction without any explanation.

I should have framed my instructions with more info: “You missed your third rep last week at 95 lb., so it’s not wise to try 100 for 5 reps today, when you just came off a long shift at work. I know you’d like to hit a PR today, but I want to make sure you get all 5 reps and feel great about that. Let’s throw 80 lb. on for 5 and see what that looks like, OK?”

If she questioned my detailed suggestion, I could have taken a breath and asked her why she had another number in mind. I could have evaluated her reasoning and either accepted it or provided her with additional reasons I was suggesting a lighter load.

Instead, I shrugged and walked away angry. I’m sure she was displeased with the interaction, too.

Flexible Leadership for the Win

It’s obvious: Gyms are full of very different people.

But coaches and gym owners still paint everyone with the same brush at times. It’s much easier to think “people need to adapt to me” than “I need to cater to others.”

In the worst cases, you’ll see my-way-or-the-highway football coaches grabbing facemasks and screaming at people. But if you watch closely in gyms, you’ll also see lots of honest mistakes where well-intentioned people just fail to communicate in the right way.

People too often forget that they need to be flexible leaders if they want to connect with various people. And some people just need to improve their people skills. In either case, the solution is to learn more about the people around you and then adjust your communication style to get the best results.

You can start doing that today so you get better results in your business tomorrow.

Get Chris Cooper’s new guide and start really connecting with prospective clients, members and staff people: “The 4 Client Avatars: How to Sell, Coach and Keep Them Forever.”

The post The 4 Personalities in Your Gym—and 1 Huge Mistake appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

12-Week Wonder: “I’ve Gained More New Members Than I’ve Had in the Last 4 Years!”

Mike Warkentin (00:00):
What can mentorship do for you as a gym owner? You’re going to find out today. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. As always, please subscribe so you don’t miss any interviews just like this. Now, Stephanie Fowler—she runs EMPOWERHOUSE Gym in Edmond, Oklahoma. She’s a recent graduate of Two-Brain’s RampUp program, and she did some amazing things, so we’re going to get right to it, so you can see what she’s done, so you can do the same stuff. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie Fowler (00:22):
Thanks Mike. I’m glad to be here.

Mike Warkentin (00:24):
I am super fired up because your mentor, Taryn, said that you did great things, and now we’re going to talk about all of it. So, I want to know some of the great things that you did in RampUp. I know you have some numbers of some pretty cool client acquisition stuff. Tell me what you did and why are you here.

Stephanie Fowler (00:37):
Well, first of all, I do want to give a lot of credit to Taryn. She’s been amazing to work with. We really jive; we both love dogs, and that’s really what sold me in taking her as my mentor. Over the last 12 weeks, I’ve gained more members than I’ve had in the last four years—new members essentially—17 new members. I’ve been in business for eight years, but in the last 12 weeks, I have just kind of created this onboarding program. That was something I never did before. It was always just a free drop in and then join, which I thought was this low barrier to entry, but I’m finding that it was a huge barrier to entry. We’ve got an onboarding program, and then with that, I’ve also hired a client success manager, so I’ve got a CSM who is helping me on the backend and really doing a lot of things and taking things off of my plate, which has been just a great help.

Mike Warkentin (01:21):
That’s amazing. And you told me before the show when we were chatting—and let me know if I’ve got this right—as a result of the stuff you did in the last 12 weeks in RampUp, you were able to pay yourself a good salary for the first time in three years. Is that right?

Stephanie Fowler (01:32):
Yes. So post-pandemic, things were really hard as it was for most gyms, and I had ended up having to go back to work while simultaneously running the gym, which I do not recommend. It’s been very challenging. But for the first time in three years, I was able to comfortably pay myself a salary, and that hasn’t happened in a long time.

Mike Warkentin (01:49):
Wow. Okay. So that’s a lot of stuff—major accomplishments in 12 weeks. I want to know how you did it, but before we get to that, tell me just the short history of your business. How long have you been around? What do you do—what kind of training? What’s your other job? Give us the 411.

Stephanie Fowler (02:02):
Yeah, so eight years ago I was just a high school teacher and a coach, and I was a random bootcamp instructor, and I saw this barrier for people entering gyms and the gym space. And so, I created an event called Bootcamp to Brunch where we meet together in a park, I offer free workouts, and we all drink bubbly and have brunch together afterwards. And in doing that, the bootcamp instructor fired me. It was kind of a conflict of interest, and I had no idea that it was even a conflict, but when that happened, I had about 20 people come to me and say, “You have to have your own space.” I have no prior business ownership. I was a high school teacher, high school softball coach, and within two weeks I had an LLC. I had no idea what I was doing. But we started out more of that bootcamp style eight years ago on August 1st, 2015, and then slowly educating myself more in the strength world. We started incorporating strength training. I have two kettlebell certifications under my belt, and so we do a lot of kettlebell work, but I would just kind of classify us as a group strength training gym that does functional fitness.

Mike Warkentin (03:01):
Hey, we have similar histories. I started a bootcamp, same thing—it was a decade or more ago—and then it ended up into a gym, and all of sudden I owned a gym with a big space and a lease, and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. So, our paths aren’t that different. Instead of Bootcamp to Brunch, mine was just called Bootcamp. You had a much more clever plan.

Stephanie Fowler (03:22):
I love that.

Mike Warkentin (03:23):
How much space have you got right now?

Stephanie Fowler (03:25):
I’m in my fourth space, so in the eight years, we are currently in our fourth location. It is my favorite, by far, location. But we’re in 1,600 square feet. We started in 3,000 square feet. And so, through some moves, and some forced moves, and some things of just “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and leases, and forced places to be. Our most recent location was really the most problematic because I had a lot of overhead, and the space was entirely too big. But in my mind, I thought I needed that. This past spring, I was able to get out of a lease just by the grace of good thoughts and trying to look for a way out and not shutting down. And so, I found this space; it’s half of what we were in, and we’re making it work.

Stephanie Fowler (04:07):
I’ve got class sizes capped at 15, and we have a more intimate setting, and it has become my favorite location. I really got to start from the ground up, and decorating, and kind of making it how I wanted. And then once you’ve done something for eight years, you kind of know how you want things if you can kind of recreate. So, I was able to do that, and that was this last May, so we’re in a newer location since May, which allowed me the freedom to invest into Two-Brain. Three years ago, I had a call with Two-Brain, and I was drowning, but I couldn’t see the way out to invest because I was drowning so badly. And so, getting into this position of “I know I need this, but I don’t how to do it.” Once I got myself in a position to move and bring my overhead down, I jumped into Two-Brain as soon as I moved.

Mike Warkentin (04:52):
Okay. It’s interesting because Chris has talked about this. Sometimes we talk to people, and they’ll say, “I’ll get a mentor when I get to a better spot.” And the joke is always, “Well, we can get you to that spot.” But you did a cool thing where you figured some stuff out on your own—got yourself into a place where then you were ready to make that commitment—then jumped in. So, I guess the question for me is: Why at that point did you make the decision to work with a mentor? What triggered that—to actually do it?

Stephanie Fowler (05:16):
One, I would say the call this time around felt different. Sometimes you jive differently with people. So, I think my introductory call this time did feel different, but also, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think we can still struggle; we can still be in hard places, but see the light, and three years ago I couldn’t. I was in a place where I was—I mean, I’m still working a lot right now—but I was just in a place that I couldn’t see a way out. And to get myself into possibly more credit card debt with the business and do all of those things—I didn’t have the capacity, I don’t think mentally or physically and financially, to do any of that and invest in the business and invest in that mentorship.

Mike Warkentin (05:56):
That makes sense. And it happens when it’s the right time for everyone. So, are you working full-time in the business? Well, I imagine you’re putting in full-time hours. Is this your sole focus, or do you have other stuff going on right now as well?

Stephanie Fowler (06:06):
I have other things as well. So after the pandemic—the pandemic was just really hard on so many gyms across the world essentially—I went back to teaching back in the public education system, which was its own weird thing during the pandemic. But I was doing that, and that became way too much. And so, I actually have a friend from the fitness industry who works for an entrepreneurial hybrid business, and I ended up accepting a position within this last summer, which does allow me some flexibility as far as my day. I’ve got an office set up at the gym, and so I’m there training; I’m also working. I will say it is challenging. I wish I had more time to pour into the gym. So, although Two-Brain has really provided me these steps to really start making things better, I’m not at the place yet to fully jump off of a salary that’s paying benefits and insurance and all of those comfortable things that sometimes gym owners don’t get the benefit of.

Mike Warkentin (06:59):
Well, you know, Chris has written about that where he’s talked about doing it that way, like hedging your bets a bit. Getting something that supports you and is stable. Getting something else set up. And then he actually wrote about—and we’ll put this link in the show notes—a transition to make that leap to full-time entrepreneurship less challenging. I think you’ve got it; if you’ve read that series, you’ve got it figured out, so that works out okay. I want to know about RampUp, and I want to know about your experience. So you start this thing up, and you’ve got some light at the end of the tunnel, but you’re probably still working too much, and you’re still struggling with stuff. What happens? How did you start making progress, and how did you make these changes so quickly over just 12 weeks?

Stephanie Fowler (07:34):
RampUp is exactly as it sounds. You are ramping up, and you’re going fast. And I’m not going to beat around the bush. It was very overwhelming. I felt at some times that I wasn’t making progress, but I actually was. But I was making all this progress, and I think, we as gym owners, sometimes we’re just extremely hard on ourselves. Even having the success that I’ve had, I’m still thinking, “Oh, it’s not good enough. I’m still not there yet. I’m still not there.” But it was just this intense 12 weeks of taking action. And that’s really what I like about Taryn is she does not coddle, and she doesn’t enable; she shoots it to you straight, and that’s exactly what I need. I want to be like, “Tell me what to do, or tell me how to do this, and I’m going to go and take action.” And so, it was just creating a free intro. I mean, before I actually officially met with Taryn, I created the free intro, and I got my very first No Sweat Intro before we had our first official call. It was just a matter of understanding Two-Brain and what they were telling you and kind of perusing through the Facebook group. And that was mid-July, and then we had our first call, and it’s just been action-oriented ever since.

Mike Warkentin (08:39):
So the Facebook group you’re talking about is Gym Owners United?

Stephanie Fowler (08:41):
Once I was accepted into Two-Brain, so the Two-Brain RampUp group.

Mike Warkentin (08:44):
Okay, so we have a private group, but we also have a public one, the Gym Owners United, and if you want to join that, go to gymownersunited.com. Chris Cooper puts all kinds of stuff in there, and you can literally take steps daily to fix and improve your business just with the free stuff. Mentorship, as Stephanie said, provides the action, the accountability, the guidance, and the targeted tactical stuff that helps you move even faster. Have you read “The Gap and The Gain” by any chance?

Stephanie Fowler (09:06):
I have not. I’ve not read it.

Mike Warkentin (09:07):
It’s an interesting concept that Chris has written about as well. You just kind of mentioned where you feel overwhelmed, and you look at this giant pile and say, “I should be here,” instead of looking back and saying, “Here’s where I actually was, and here’s where I got to.” So, you’re looking at how far you’ve come rather than how far you have to go, and it’s an interesting concept. And gym owners, if that happens to you, check out that book because I think we’re all victims of it. So, you got an intro in place, and you got a client. Were you able to go on the first mentorship call and say, “Hey, I got a client already.”

Stephanie Fowler (09:32):
I can’t quite remember how that all worked out. I may have at least said that I put the free intro up. She was giving me some first steps, and I was like, “Well, I’ve already done that. It might not be what it’s supposed to be, but I just decided to take a button and put it on the website.” But within that first even four weeks, I had my first call with Taryn, I signed up with Kilo and changed my website, I set up gym lead software, and then, most recently, I’m also transitioning over to their fully installed pack of gym software management. So, I just dove in with, “I’m going to do it. I’m all in. I’m all in.”

Mike Warkentin (10:08):
Now, and you saw results; you said over the 12 weeks of RampUp you got, I think it was 17 to 20 clients, correct?

Stephanie Fowler (10:13):
Yeah, 17. I just was looking at opportunities. Yeah. 17 people that have either done upsells—well actually 17 No Sweat Intros that have converted, so 17 that have converted. And then in addition to that, I’ve also taken current members who I had personal training—I used to always say that group training was my favorite; that’s what I told myself. But I have actually taken some of my current group training clients, and we’re doing personal training, and they’re doing packages and spending upwards of $600 a month that I, in my mind, would’ve never envisioned that they would do. It was almost the previous part of me—or the previous version of me—felt bad taking money. And I also created that story for myself, which is nuts. I started out the gym charging way too little, and I’ve had these incremental price increases, and I actually did a price increase before Two-Brain.

Stephanie Fowler (11:04):
I did my price increase when I got into the next space. And so, I kind of worked through that on my own, but it’s always one of the hardest things to do. But I’ve now told myself, “I run a business, and I’m good at what I do, and I’m a good coach. I deserve to make income here, and I deserve to make money, and this gym deserves to ask for it for providing that great service.” So, I’ve really shifted my mindset around that, and Taryn’s definitely helped with that.

Mike Warkentin (11:27):
So again, we’re not dissimilar. I did the exact same thing and felt bad taking money from people not realizing the value. Why not realize the value, right? And all of a sudden, my gym was in major trouble, and we needed to have a rate increase, and we worked through that with a Two-Brain mentor, and it went just fine. And it actually put the gym in a spot where it wasn’t going to fail, and then these people get to still get to train and get healthier and get the value of coaching. But I was the exact same as you. Do you know your ARM—average revenue per member per month? How has that changed?

Stephanie Fowler (11:55):
I don’t have it off the top of my head, but it has changed.

Mike Warkentin (11:57):
Yeah. If you’re on $600 packages, and you were charging too little before, it’s changed a lot, I imagine.

Stephanie Fowler (12:01):
Yeah, yeah. It’s gone up a slight bit. I mean my numbers are nowhere where we started. I mean, I’ve been anywhere from 120 members to—I started with Two-Brain right around the 58 mark. Just pandemic, maybe speaking loudly about civil justice things that were polarizing. There’s just been a lot there, and I’ve learned a lot in the last three years in so many ways. But I’m in that 60 range for members, and we’ve grown close to 80. And so, that’s substantial when you think about smaller numbers.

Mike Warkentin (12:35):
Huge, especially at a higher ARM.

Stephanie Fowler (12:37):
Yeah, so it’s definitely worked out in ways that—it almost feels like voodoo in a way, and I know that sounds crazy. I can’t believe I didn’t have an onboarding process before. And the people want to come in; they want to talk to you about their goals. You ask these simple questions, and these questions are so powerful. I’m a connector, and I think that I know my members very well, especially the ones—I mean, I’ve had people with me this entire time. I’ve had a group of people, I would say 15, that have been with me from the beginning. But the questions that you ask in these No Sweat Intros just instantly get them to be vulnerable. And so, I’ve connected in these No Sweat Intros in ways that may have taken me six months or eight months down the road in the previous way that I was doing things and getting people to become members. So, it’s pretty magical to kind of share that from the beginning and then hit the ground running with training.

Mike Warkentin (13:26):
Listeners, the short version: The No Sweat Intro is a free consultation that takes about 50 minutes or less where you ask a series of questions, and you prescribe a solution to their problems. And that is part of the prescriptive model. Chris Cooper’s written about that a ton. And it’s just that. You meet with someone, you ask them some questions, you find out what you need to know about them, and then you prescribe a solution to their problems. And the sales process is very easy because they kind of go, “Yeah, I need that.” And away you go. When you started adding these members—so you start RampUp, you’re in this process and all this—you said it kind of felt like voodoo. You’re starting to add members fast. Did that just kind of blow your mind that it’s working already?

Stephanie Fowler (14:03):
Yeah, every—we had this—we actually still do it. I have my girlfriend—every time I convert a No Sweat Intro, I text her, and I’m like, “Again!” But it is surprising, and I still am honored when I sit in front of someone and ask for this price point that I would’ve never asked for two years ago. And so, it still surprises me, still surprises me.

Mike Warkentin (14:26):
It feels good when you get that, right?

Stephanie Fowler (14:27):
Yeah, and I thought that doing an onboarding program was more work. What I didn’t realize is it’s less work because we’re getting these people in for these sessions, and I’m training them on how they need to operate in our gym so that when they do jump in, my coaches aren’t having to spend extra time with them. We’re not having to spend extra time with them. There’s not this lack of knowledge. They learn it after this onboarding program, and then they’re ready to jump in and excel with the group.

Mike Warkentin (14:54):
Yeah, onboarding programs become a lot of work when your retention sucks, right? If you’re honest about it because you’re like, “I’m constantly onboarding people, and they’re bleeding out the back, so I’m constantly onboarding people.” You know, just that vicious cycle, and then you’re marketing all the time spending money on that. It’s horrible. So, the longer you can retain people, and it sounds like your retention is pretty good because you’re obviously a great coach and have kept people for years. If you can get those people in the door, onboard them, and get them happy, away you go. Have you started with goal review sessions, or is that something that’s on your list?

Stephanie Fowler (15:20):
It is on the list. My client success manager sets them up, so after they finish their onboarding, we go ahead after they—basically, it’s after they do their first group class. So, they’ve graduated from our foundations, they jump in a group, and then we set that up for three months later. And so, we have our first one coming up. My very first—I’ll never forget my first onboarding; it’s just kind of the special one, like, “Oh, this is the first person that ever did this.” But hers, it will be at the end of October or beginning of November, so that’ll be our first one.

Mike Warkentin (15:46):
Okay, and goal review sessions, listeners, have been proven with Two-Brain data to increase average revenue per member and length of engagement because you’re talking to people, and you’re solving, “Hey, are there any problems I need to look at? Perfect, we’ll solve that. Are you having success? Okay, we’ll tweak this, so you are having success. Oh, you are having success? That’s great. Let’s celebrate that and set some new goals.” Right? This is a retention thing, but it also often raises average revenue per member because these people purchase additional services. I’d love to add some personal training to get this skill faster—stuff like that. I want to ask you about your client success manager. You mentioned that CSM, client or customer success manager—that’s a hire for you. What is that person doing, and what do you want to see from that position?

Stephanie Fowler (16:26):
So, in Two-Brain, kind of in the very beginning, I talked about it as being the joy girl or the joy person. And so, I had this member, her name was Addie, and she’s been with us through three pregnancies—strength training the whole time, just a light and energy as she walks into the room; she’s always so kind. And as I was learning more about the CSM position, she just instantly came to mind. And so, she stays at home with her kids, and so I was looking for something that was flexible. You know, this isn’t a job that requires a ton of time, but I reached out to her about it, and she was very interested. And so, she’s helping me on the backend with our gym lead software, and she reaches out to new leads. She reaches out once people have graduated from our onboarding, and she sets up those client goal reviews, and she’s just doing a lot. She’s also doing our “Bright Spot” Fridays. So, we have “Bright Spots” on Fridays, and we’ve done all of these things throughout the eight years. You can’t survive for eight years without having done some of these things. But now we have the process, and we’re organized about it, and we are more methodical. And so, Addie’s kind of behind that and the methods and making sure that we touch everybody a lot.

Mike Warkentin (17:33):
So, client success manager is a new hire; it’s a new position for you. Was that nerve-racking? Making that—hiring someone or adding something on when you just got the business to a place where you felt like you saw some light at the end of the tunnel?

Stephanie Fowler (17:44):
Not really. The client success manager position doesn’t work a lot of hours. They’re just really working in pivotal hours and doing pivotal things and taking things off of my plate. They’re—I’m working on bigger things, and so some of these action items are just the simpler things that are taking up too much space in my brain. And so, Addie’s really in charge of that, and Addie loves it. Addie loves connecting. She’s kind; she wants people to succeed, and that’s in her DNA. So, for me, this just felt like a natural progression. I was just happy to hand it off. I am a visionary when it comes to owning the business, and so I’m happy to let go of the vine and let people that do things better than me or more efficiently do it; take it so that I can be better at other things.

Mike Warkentin (18:28):
That’s a great skill to have. Did you do the value ladder exercise with Taryn?

Stephanie Fowler (18:32):
I don’t believe so.

Mike Warkentin (18:32):
Okay. That’s the one—and you might’ve done it by a different name or just done it without labeling it—that’s the one where you look at all the stuff you do, and you say, “What is taking up a ton of my time that I can offload for cheap and find—use that time to make more money?” Right.

Stephanie Fowler (18:46):
We did. Yeah, we definitely did that. We broke that down.

Mike Warkentin (18:48):
Yeah. So, the name that Chris has referred to is the value ladder. Listeners, you look at your whole list of stuff, and you’re like, “I spend this much time cleaning my gym every week.” It’s usually that one that goes first. You could hire a cleaner for $60 a week, you take those four hours that you would’ve spent scrubbing toilets, you make more than $60 by selling gym memberships, and your business grows. That principle can be applied all the way up to the CEO position, Stephanie, which is what you are talking about. I want to know what’s next. So, you’ve got RampUp, you had these incredible results, you started paying yourself a good salary, you had tons of clients coming in—fantastic results—and that’s just the first 12-week sprint—the quick wins that we want to get. What are you guys targeting now that you’ve graduated into the growth program?

Stephanie Fowler (19:24):
Well, Taryn tells me we’re trying to get to 100K, which is wild to me. And I know—I still know that I have more work to do. I’m still refining processes and still making things better. And I think that’s the point. We’re never done. It’s just keeping, refining, and putting things, and making changes as needed. But that’s what Taryn tells me, so that’s what we’re doing, which is mind blowing to me a little bit to think about being in that range and allowing myself to think that I can make 100K.

Mike Warkentin (19:55):
You doubled your revenue in RampUp, right? So, if you keep going, 100K probably—I mean, it sounds like it’s probably not that far. It’s probably not something that seems as far away as it once did. How about that?

Stephanie Fowler (20:07):
No, and Mike, I had months where I brought in substantial income, but I wasn’t using it correctly, and I didn’t know what I was doing with the business. It was just I was taking all the money, and whatever was left, that was my salary. I just didn’t have processes in place. And I’m starting to see numbers where I’ve taken in—gross profit—10,000, 11,000 a month. And for my small amount of people, that’s crazy to me. When, you know, five months ago, my overhead was eating into that big time, and so I just see lots of potential. So next—I love this extra position that I have; it allows me some freedom. But in the beginning, I really worked with Taryn to kind of refine it like, “Hey, maybe I could do both.” And she was like, “Do you really want to do both? Do you want to?” And so, I’m playing with those ideas of “Where do I want to spend my time?” And I know that’s with the gym, so I can spend more time doing that, and feeding that, and hiring more coaches, and having a general manager. I see those things as next steps down the road.

Mike Warkentin (21:05):
What’s the one tactical thing that you’re doing right now? What is your next step? You talk about—to me, 100K is long term; that’s the big goal or something you’re working toward. What are the things, now that you’ve just made the transition into the “growth” stage, what is the next thing on your list? What did Taryn give you to do?

Stephanie Fowler (21:20):

Well, the very next thing that I’m doing right now is I’m going to stop cleaning the gym myself. And I’m going to go—I’ve gone in phases where I’ve had someone clean, but to cut back on costs when I moved, I started cleaning the gym again. So, the very next thing I’m doing is I’m about to find someone to come and clean the gym for me. I’m tired of doing that. And then, I’m just digging deeper into the growth kit. I’m getting deeper into, you know, the Nutrition Challenge. Do we have our SOPs written for the—I want everything perfect when it comes to that. I want to just solidify all those processes and really just refine those as we—now I feel like there’s more breathing room and growth. I still know it’s moving fast, but I’ve been able to breathe and kind of see back—sit back—with some perspective and then see what I can go back and kind of refine after sprinting uphill for a while.

Mike Warkentin (22:07):
Yeah, listeners, that RampUp here—12-week sprint—you’re going to push hard. You’re going to work hard; you’re going to get major results. I believe the stat is 93% of our clients see an ROI on their investment—return on their investment—in 12 weeks. 93%—that’s a huge number.

Stephanie Fowler (22:24):
Can I jump in, Mike? I want to say that I still did not have the funds to pay for Two-Brain when I started. I was putting it on a credit card, and they knew. I was like, “I’m going to put this on a business credit card.” So, in addition to paying myself the salary, I pay for Two-Brain out of my gym account every month without having to put it on a credit card. And in addition to the salary, that’s huge to me that I was just taking a risk and putting on credit and hoping I could make those things paid. And now my gym pays for that, and that’s not something I have to stress about.

Mike Warkentin (22:50):
Is that ever cool? So that—so you’re seeing a return on your investment, obviously?

Stephanie Fowler (22:54):
Oh yeah. For sure; big time.

Mike Warkentin (22:56):
That’s—so that’s—listeners, there’s proof of the stat that I just kicked out. In “growth” stage—we talked about—she just mentioned the growth toolkit. What that is, is a giant pile of stuff about tactics and strategies that can be used to fix your business. You don’t just pick them all. Your mentor helps you pick the one that’s going to make the greatest difference right now for your unique business. And it could be anything from Nutrition Challenge, like Stephanie just mentioned. We’ve got plug and play resources for that where you just download them, tweak them a little bit, implement them as you see fit. Or it could be something else like targeting retention. What am I going to do to make retention? Or marketing—I need to get some clients. I’m going to run a “Bring a Friend” event. All this stuff is in there, and it’s all available—plug and play.

Mike Warkentin (23:34):
Your mentor tells you where it is, so that’s something to look for in the “growth” stage. And then the one that you mentioned—Taryn is always hinting at this—is once you get to $100,000 in net owner benefit, that is what we call the Tinker stage. And that’s where you start thinking about: What else can I do with my business? Do I want to open a second location? Do I want to open another location? Do I want to just offload this and sit back and go on vacation myself for a bit? All these options are available to you. And Taryn had hinted that maybe you’d be someone who would be on that track. Does that sound accurate?

Stephanie Fowler (24:00):
She is saying a lot of these things. We talk about them in our call. But I love that she has that faith in me, and I like that she sees that I’m taking action and sees the potential.

Mike Warkentin (24:11):
Do you think that’s the most important thing: taking action? Because a lot of people—like literally, you could look at Two-Brain resources for free, and you could fix your gym, but if you don’t take action, it’s not going to work. And so, a mentor helps you take action. Is that a key thing for you?

Stephanie Fowler (24:25):
Oh yeah. Accountability. I mean, our clients hire us because they want accountability. It’s the same thing. So, I always say action, but get to action. It’s just—sometimes it’s hard, and I get analysis paralysis. I think I’m an overthinker, and if it’s not perfect, then I don’t want to do it just yet until it’s perfect. And so, just taking action, jumping in, and then seeing that things will work, and you just have to take that first step.

Mike Warkentin (24:48):
Last thing I’m going to ask you before I let you go back to growing your gym is this: Someone is in the position that you were in just a little while ago. They’re like, “Man, I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel. I am struggling right now.” What do you tell them? What do they do?

Stephanie Fowler (25:00):
Jump in. I would not have envisioned that I would have grown by 17 members in 12 weeks. There’s no way I would’ve believed that. And it felt hard in the beginning, but creating the processes and having the handholding, and the mentorship, and the calls, and the accountability has just been life changing. Because six months ago, I thought I was going to be shutting my gym down, so it was either I jump in and invest or I just close the doors, and that’s not what I wanted.

Mike Warkentin (25:29):
And it’s not what your clients would’ve wanted.

Stephanie Fowler (25:30):
Yeah, yeah. And so, it’s really been life changing for me.

Mike Warkentin (25:35):
Oh, well that’s so great to hear, and you sound like someone we probably need to have back in about six months to see where—how far up there you are.

Stephanie Fowler (25:41):
I would love that. I would love that.

Mike Warkentin (25:44):
Alright. Thank you so much for your time, Stephanie. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” That was Stephanie Fowler of Empower Fitness—oh, I’m sorry; I’ve got that wrong. EMPOWERHOUSE Gym. I love that name. I’ve got to ask you before we go: Where’d you come up with that name? It’s brilliant.

Stephanie Fowler (25:56):
I was a high school coach, and you talk about good programs or powerhouses, and so I’ve always wanted to make sure people feel empowered—so EMPOWERHOUSE. I just put it all together.

Mike Warkentin (26:06):
That is a brilliant name. As with the Bootcamp and Brunch. I like that one too. I think you should probably trademark that one. Anyways, as I said: Stephanie Fowler. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin, and on your way out, please hit “Subscribe” wherever you’re watching or listening. I don’t want you to miss any stories like this and all the tips from the top gym owners in the world. They are here every month, along with Chris Cooper, our founder, who comes on here four times a month at least and gives you advice. And now here’s your Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper, with a final word.

Chris Cooper (26:33):
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 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.

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