Chris Cooper's Blog, page 58

Top Skills for Gym Owners: Virtuosity

Keep it simple.

That’s how you maintain focus, build momentum and grow your business.

Virtuosity is the skill of doing the simple stuff really well, over and over, with consistency and excellence.

In other words:

Master the basics yourself. Systemize them for your staff. Optimize outcomes over time, but do the actions forever. Do not stop when confronted by challenge, boredom or novelty.

This is a very tough skill to master. High-level performers in golf, for example, work on their basic swing for years; novices buy new equipment. New basketball players focus more on their shoes than their dribbling. Cyclists buy lighter bikes instead of spending five more hours every week in the saddle.

Greg Glassman, founder of CrossFit, used the gymnastics definition of virtuosity: performing the common uncommonly well.

For example, gym owners should work to master selling their program before attempting to “flood their gym with leads.” But the siren song of “leads! leads! leads!” is strong enough to distract most of them.

Likewise, gym owners should develop their staff members to make them all an “8/10” as coaches instead of employing a few “3s” and one “9.” This includes doing evaluations and offering feedback—uncomfortable processes that many gym owners forget or ignore.

Entrepreneurs in any service business should develop the skills of asking for referrals, nurturing leads and creating content before considering a TikTok account—but most lack the discipline to master the basics because the lure of novelty is so strong.

Beware the Novice’s Curse

One of the challenges of mastering the basics is that the process gets boring.

Who wants to do another sales role-playing exercise when they could shoot an Instagram reel or record a podcast? It’s tempting to be the first to try (and talk about) a new idea, be an early adopter or tell your friends how to do the new thing. This is the curse of the novice.

In a letter to coaches around the world, Glassman wrote, “There is a compelling tendency among novices developing any skill or art, whether learning to play the violin, write poetry, or compete in gymnastics, to quickly move past the fundamentals and on to more elaborate, more sophisticated movements, skills or techniques. This compulsion is the novice’s curse—the rush to originality and risk.”

He went on to describe the “novice’s curse”—manifested as “excessive adornment, silly creativity, weak fundamentals and, ultimately, a marked lack of virtuosity and delayed mastery.”

This is equally accurate when applied to business.

Focusing on building a Facebook-ads campaign before a consistent sales process means a lot of time is wasted on cold leads, poor conversion and burnout. Worse, it’s hard to learn to be a better salesperson if the pitch is different every time—the entrepreneur can’t see what’s working with clarity.

What are the basics every entrepreneur should master?

Reading a profit-and-loss statement (P&L).Getting client referrals.Ensuring consistent delivery of their service by their staff.Selling their product.Mastering client communications.Performing staff evaluations.Engaging in regular content creation.And more.

It’s important to note that “mastery” of any of these skills is nearly impossible. But most entrepreneurs can grow their business faster by improving the fundamentals than by adding new strategies or tactics.

For example, every entrepreneur should know how to read a P&L. Even basic familiarity will help an entrepreneur understand how the business is doing. But the pursuit of mastery—asking questions of the bookkeeper, thinking about classifications, identifying opportunities and putting in lots of reps—will grow their business faster than searching for new trends on social media. The P&L should create focus for a business owner, which is the first step to growth.

As another example, a business owner who can improve close rate by 10 percent will grow the business faster than an owner who doubles ad spend. Ads take time to ramp up, they take time to optimize, and they require constant monitoring. When lead flow begins to slow down, the ads must be retooled, and the process begins again.

But sales is different: Performing better with every lead will multiply the value of all future advertising. But most entrepreneurs skip from platform to platform, make small investments in each and then move to the next when their ads “don’t work.”

Skills and a Lifetime of ROI

The basics never go away. Mastering them is more important than learning something new, but the pull of novelty is strong. Our job, as coaches and mentors, is to teach the basics and then revisit them with the entrepreneurs we serve. Of course we can’t ignore the fun, new stuff. But novelty must always be balanced with the pursuit of virtuosity in the fundamentals.

In this series, I’ve walked you through three skills every gym owner should have: focus, “gain thinking” and virtuosity. There are more, such as patience, abundance mindset, evidence-based decision making, healthy skepticism and so on. We help entrepreneurs acquire these skills in our mentorship program even if we don’t always call them out by name.

And why is skill acquisition important? Well, the value of skills compounds. You can’t be taxed on your skills, you can’t lose them in a breakup, and your landlord can’t increase your rent as you acquire them.

Building skills is really what makes you a good entrepreneur for life.

To talk to a member of my team about improving your business skills, click here.

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Top Skills for Gym Owners: Gain Thinking

The real secret to success as a gym owner is building and keeping momentum.

You’re going to have setbacks. You can’t avoid them. The key is to ensure those setbacks happen less often and have minimal effect.

Imagine you’re trying to walk up a road. You keep taking a small step forward and then a small step backward. You do this over and over until you’re tired. But you haven’t gone anywhere!

But then one day you take two steps forward and then one backward. That’s much better. You’re getting somewhere. You’re not going fast, and you’re probably frustrated at your pace, but you’re getting closer to your destination.

And then, a few days later, you’re able to take three steps forward before taking one back. Then four steps forward and one step back. Then five steps—and on and on.

This is what it means to build momentum. In business, it’s more important to build and keep momentum than to do any one momentous thing.

When I look at a gym owner’s progress over the last year or two years and I see a lot of ups and downs—one step forward and one step back—I know they’re working hard and I know they’re trying things, but I also know they’ll never grow. Because they don’t have momentum.

Here’s how to fix the problem.

1. Measure Backward

This sounds counterintuitive, but you must measure how far you’ve come instead of how far you have to go.

Momentum requires energy. You create energy for yourself when you have little “wins” in your business—you take one step forward and you feel great. Repeated success creates momentum.

In his book “The Gap and the Gain,” Dan Sullivan gives the advice to focus on “the gain”: look back at the progress you’ve already made. He calls this “measuring backward, not forward”—which means comparing your current position against your former position instead of your ideal position.

Basically, count your wins.

Here’s how I do it: Every night, before I go to sleep, I ask myself, “What did I do today to grow my business?”

I think back through the day and hopefully find something that clearly grew my business in a measurable way. It doesn’t have to be a momentous thing—it can be one blog post, one email to some former clients, one No Sweat Intro.

It doesn’t have to be momentous; it just has to preserve my momentum.

2. Keep Doing What’s Working

When something works, keep doing it until it stops working—not until you’re bored with it. We’re all drawn to new ideas. But we have limited bandwidth. So when we find a new idea, we usually stop doing what we’re currently doing and start doing the new thing instead.

This “one and done” thinking is what creates the ups and downs in your revenue and the feeling of “one step forward, one step back” in your head.

For example, let’s say you come to the Two-Brain Summit and you learn about doing sell by chat on Instagram. You go home and text 300 people the next day. You get nine to book an appointment and sell to five. That’s pretty great for two hours of work, right?

You should do that every month and every week—even every day.

Instead, you probably heard about setting up your customer relationship management (CRM) system. So the next week you do that. And the third week you start using AI to write blog posts. And the fourth week you start a podcast. Three months later, you haven’t done any more sell by chat on Instagram. One and done, you quit doing the thing that was working.

Even if the new idea works, there’s always a ramp-up period. So when you stop doing the thing that is working, your revenue dips before the new thing takes its place.

3. Delegate

Maybe you started doing Goal Reviews and started getting referrals. But you don’t like doing them, so you forget to book 20 for next month.

Or you try to automate them by sending out emails or whatever. And you stop getting referrals. You think, “Oh, they only worked for a while,” when in truth you only worked them for a while.

This is what your staff is for.

We teach gym owners to systemize, optimize and automate the stuff they don’t like. So after you’ve done something, write the process down. Then teach it to someone else. Watch them do it. Tweak the system to make it better (this is what a mentor does). Then delegate or automate it—it’s the same thing; the word is just different if you’re talking about humans or robots.

Build Momentum!

The most important force in business is momentum.

All the books you read about the 1 percent rule and building habits and incremental gains, they’re really all just about momentum. And gain thinking creates momentum by having you focus on your wins every day.

If you see your progress, you’ll keep going. Success creates momentum.

In the next post in this series, I’m going to talk about the hardest entrepreneurial skill to acquire: virtuosity.

The post Top Skills for Gym Owners: Gain Thinking appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The 3 Essential Business Skills Every Gym Owner Must Have

Chris Cooper (00:00): Building a good gym requires strategy, tactics, and skills. Strategies are your overarching plans, like your business plan. Tactics are what you’re going to do to get there, like an email list, and skills are what make you good at doing that stuff long term. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if you want to talk more about strategies, tactics, and skills, please go to gymownersunited.com. Join that free group, and we talk about this stuff in there every day. Now, in our mentorship practice, we give gym owners step-by-step tactics to grow, and then we build long-term strategies to help them act on those tactics. But we also teach entrepreneurial skills, and here’s why: Skills have compounding value.

(00:46): They become more valuable over time because, first, a little bit of each skill is helpful, but a high skill level pays off even more. You can get better, and that will help you. Second, nobody can copy your skills. They’re an unassailable advantage. Third, the government can’t tax you on skills. Fourth, you don’t lose skills. If one business fails, then these skills will help you build the next business even faster. Fifth, they can be improved regardless of outcome, so if you win, you learn a lesson, and if you lose, you learn a lesson that builds your skills. Sixth, they multiply your other investments. And seventh, the time and effort invested to learning skills has lifelong returns.

(01:30): The first skill that every gym owner needs is focus. Focus is a skill that will multiply your return on everything that you do to grow your business. The gym owners who get the best ROI on our mentorship program, for instance, often tell me, “I just did what my mentor told me to do.” And that’s because they do one thing at a time, and they don’t get distracted by anything else. And the owners who get the lowest ROI—which is still good—they’ll say, “Oh, I’m just so busy to do the work; I need more time.” But it’s really because they’re distracted by social media, Facebook groups, their staff listening to five podcasts every week and two audio books, and they just can’t dedicate 30 uninterrupted minutes to doing the work that will actually grow the gym. Now, of course, the top performers and the lowest performers have the same amount of work, but the top earners have the skill of focus, and that’s the difference maker.

(02:25): Now, usually these highly focused people have a family, they own their business, of course, and they also train hard. The most focused sometimes even have multiple fields of play, which are all important enough to give undivided focus for certain periods at a time. They’re not just running a business, but they’re also raising their kids or their pets, and they might be doing triathlons first, right? But they’re not letting one thing distract from the other. They’re focusing entirely on one thing and then moving to focusing entirely on another. Now, some clients—some gym owners—don’t have strong focus skills, but they can force a deep focus when it’s required. These are people like me who do their best work right before a deadline. These are people who can be really successful in our RampUp program because of the high accountability, but they’ll never be successful just by reading books or listening to podcasts. They won’t benefit from a group coaching program unless they’re in it for a very long time because it’s hard for them to pick out the pearls. They’re a bit slower than that first group who has intense focus, but they’re going to get there.

(03:33): Now, other gym owners don’t have any focus skills, and they’re overwhelmed, and they’re stressed all the time. In most cases, one-on-one mentorship is their only hope. In these cases, the mentor has to do really frequent touch points—almost daily. Or they can make appointments with themself, as the gym owner, and do the work and show their mentor when they have these focus blocks planned. These clients might benefit, even, from scheduled open office hours where they just show up and work, but they won’t benefit from getting a new task or a new idea every single month. They won’t benefit from reading 50 books a year. The great news here is that focus isn’t a gift you inherit. It’s a skill that you build, and when you build it, that compounds your efforts in everything else you do.

(04:18): Start by getting an office with a door that closes. Spend at least one hour there every day. Leave your phone outside that door. Here’s my rule to force focus. Every day, I do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. It’s the only way that I can dedicate my focus to growing my business. If I wait until I’m at work, I will lose my focus on the drive there—the phone will ring, or I’ll hear a podcast, or I’ll ruminate on stuff, and I’ll build this mental checklist of urgent tasks that need to be done. In the next part of this podcast, I’m going to share the next skill, which is gain thinking, and how to get it. But the real secret to success as a gym owner is building and keeping momentum, okay? You’re going to have setbacks. You can’t avoid them. The key is to make those setbacks happen less often and have less effect.

(05:07): Imagine that you’re trying to walk up the road, and you keep taking a small step forward and then a small step backward, and you do this over and over and over until you’re tired, but you haven’t gotten anywhere, and you know it. But then one day, you take two steps forward and then one backward. Well, that’s much better. You’re getting somewhere. You’re not going fast, and you’re probably still frustrated that you’re not going faster, but you’re getting closer. And then a few days later, you’re able to take three steps forward before taking one back again, and then four steps forward and one step back, and then five steps forward—and so on and so on. This is what building momentum means. In business, it’s more important to build and keep momentum than to do any one momentous thing. When I look at a gym owner’s progress over the last year or last two years, and I see a lot of ups and downs—or in other words, one step forward, one step back—I know that they’re working hard.

(06:07): I know that they’re trying new things, but I also know they’re not going to grow because they don’t have momentum. So, here’s how to fix it. Our second skill is momentum, and the way that you fix that is you measure backward. Now, this sounds counterintuitive, but you have to measure how far you’ve come instead of how far you have left to go. Momentum requires energy. You create energy for yourself when you have little wins in your business. You take one step forward, and you feel great, and repeated success steps forward. That creates momentum. In his book “The Gap and The Gain,” Dan Sullivan gives the advice to focus on the gain; look back at your progress instead of looking forward at where you want to be or where everybody else is. He calls this measuring backward, not forward, which means comparing your current position against your former position instead of your ideal position someday.

(07:05): Basically, you count your wins. Here’s how I do it: Every night before I go to sleep, I ask myself, “What did I do today to grow my business?” And then I think back through the day and hopefully find something that actually grew my business. It doesn’t have to be a momentous thing—it can be one blog post or one email to some former clients or one NSI—but it has to grow my business in a measurable way. It doesn’t have to be momentous; it just has to preserve my momentum. Showing up in coaching, showing up and delivering, returning phone calls, returning emails—that doesn’t grow my business; that’s playing defense. When something works, and this is part two of building momentum, the first step is gain thinking—counting backward. The second thing is when something works, keep doing it until it stops working, not just until you’re bored with it.

(07:55): We’re all drawn to new ideas, but we have limited bandwidth; so, when we find a new idea, we usually have to stop doing something we’re currently doing and start doing the new thing instead. This “one and done” thinking is what creates the ups and downs in your revenue and the feeling of one step forward, one step back in your head. For example, let’s say you came to the summit last year, and you learned about doing sell by chat on Instagram. You go home, and you text 300 people the next day. Nine of those people book an appointment, and then you sell five people on your gym. Now that’s pretty great for two hours work, right? You should probably do that every month, every week, and then even every day. Instead, you also heard something about setting up your CRM.

(08:41): So, the next week you set up your CRM, and the third week you start using AI to write blog posts. And then the fourth week, you start a podcast, and three months later, you haven’t done any more sell by chat on Instagram, even though you know it worked. One and done—you quit doing the thing that was working. Even if the new idea works, there’s always a ramp up period. So, you stop doing the thing that was working the sell by chat on Instagram, and your revenue dips before the new thing takes its place. Now, the next thing that you can do to maintain momentum is delegate. Maybe you started doing goal reviews, and you started getting some referrals. You got better at them; you were building some momentum, but you don’t really like doing them. So, you forget to book 20 goal reviews for next month, or maybe you try to automate them by sending out emails instead.

(09:30): You water the process down until it stops working, and then you stop getting referrals. You think, “Oh, they only work for a little while.” When in truth, you only work them for a little while, and this is what your staff is for. We teach gym owners to systemize, optimize, and automate the stuff they don’t like. So, after you’ve done something once and it’s worked, write it down. Then teach it to somebody else, then watch them do it, and then tweak the system to make it better. Evaluate them, mentor them, right? This is what a mentor does. And then delegate the task or automate it—it’s the same thing; the word’s just different. If you’re talking about humans or robots, the most important force in business is momentum. All the books that you read about the “1% Rule” and building habits and incremental gains—they’re really all just about momentum. Gain thinking creates momentum by having you focus on your wins every day. If you see your progress, you’ll keep going. Success creates momentum, so the second skill that entrepreneurs need to build is gain thinking because it creates momentum.

(10:34): Now, I’m going to tell you about the hardest skill of all for entrepreneurs to build, and that’s virtuosity. That means keep it simple. That’s how you maintain focus, how you build momentum, and how you grow your business. Virtuosity is doing the simple stuff really well over and over with consistency and excellence. In other words, master the basics yourself, systemize them for your staff, optimize outcomes over time, but do the actions forever. In other words, get better at them, but don’t stop. Do not stop when you’re confronted by a challenge. Don’t stop when you’re confronted by boredom. Don’t stop when you’re confronted by novelty. Virtuosity is a very tough skill to master.

(11:19): For example, high level performers in golf work on their basic swing for years, but newcomers to golf just go out and buy new clubs. New basketball players focus more on their shoes than on their dribbling. Cyclists buy lighter bikes instead of spending another five hours per week in the saddle. Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, used the gymnastics definition of virtuosity, which is “performing the common uncommonly well.” For example, a gym owner should work to master their skill in selling their program before they attempt to flood their gym with leads through marketing. But the siren song that they see on Facebook and Instagram of “leads, leads, leads” is strong enough to distract most of them from getting good at sales.

(12:04): Likewise, a gym owner should develop their staff to make them all “eight out of tens” as coaches instead of employing a few “three out of tens” and one “nine out of 10.” This includes evaluations and feedback, which are uncomfortable processes that many gym owners forget or ignore. Entrepreneurs in any service business—not just gyms—should develop the skill of asking for referrals, nurturing leads, and creating content before they start thinking about a TikTok account, but most lack the discipline to master the basics because the lure of novelty is so strong. And hey, I’m one of them. One of the challenges of mastering the basics is that it gets boring. Who wants to do another sales role-play session when they could shoot an Instagram reel or record a new podcast? It’s tempting to be the first to try and talk about a new idea, to be an early adopter, or to tell your friends how to do the new thing, but this is the curse of the novice. This is the hallmark of gyms that don’t grow.

(13:00): They’re always doing the new thing instead of consistently executing on the stuff that works. I remember this letter to coaches that Glassman wrote, and he said, “There is a compelling tendency among novices developing any skill or art, whether it’s learning to play the violin or write poetry or compete in gymnastics, to quickly move past the fundamentals and on to more elaborate, more sophisticated movements, skills, or techniques. This compulsion is the novice’s curse—the rush to originality and risk.” That was Glassman. He went on to describe the novice’s curse, and he said that it manifested as excessive adornment or silly creativity or weak fundamentals and, ultimately, a market lack of virtuosity and delayed mastery. Hey, I know. I remember the horrible muscle ups that I used to do just so that I could say I did a muscle up instead of working on like false grip ring pullups.

(13:59): And this is equally true in business, focusing on building a Facebook ads campaign before you have a consistent sales process means a lot of wasted time on cold leads, poor conversion, and burnout. And worse, it’s hard to learn to be a better salesperson if your pitch is different every time because the entrepreneur can’t see what’s working with clarity. You don’t have that consistency built in. So, what are the basics that every gym owner should master? Reading their profit and loss statement, getting client referrals, consistent delivery of their service by their staff, selling their product, communicating with their clients, evaluating their staff, creating content, and, you know, there are a few more, but you should focus on getting good at those first. That’s virtuosity. Now, it’s important to note that mastery of any of those that I just said is nearly impossible, but most entrepreneurs can grow their business faster by getting good at those fundamentals than by adding any new strategy or tactic.

(15:00): For example, every gym owner should know how to read a profit and loss statement—a P&L. Even basic familiarity will help the gym owner understand how their business is doing. But the pursuit of mastery, which involves asking questions of your bookkeeper, thinking about how you classify expenses and revenues, identifying opportunities for growth, putting in lots of reps, reading P&Ls—that will grow your business faster than searching for new trends on social media. The P&L should create focus for a business owner, which is the first step to growth. Here’s another example: A gym owner who can improve their close rate by 10% will grow their business faster than an owner who doubles their ad spend because ads take time to ramp up, time to optimize, and they require constant monitoring. And then when they begin to slow down, they have to be retooled, and the process begins again.

(15:54): But sales is different. Performing better with every lead will multiply the value of all future advertising. Most entrepreneurs skip from platform to platform. They try Facebook, they try Instagram, TikTok, whatever. They make little investments in each, and then they move on to the next when the ads don’t work. Instead, they should be improving their sales process so that they can get and keep the clients that they do get from these platforms. The basics never go away. Mastering them is more important than learning something new 99% of the time. But the pull of novelty is very strong. Our job as coaches and mentors is to teach the basics and then revisit them with the entrepreneurs that we serve. Of course, we can’t ignore the fun new stuff, but novelty must always be balanced with the pursuit of virtuosity and the fundamentals. So, this week I’m walking you through three skills that every gym owner should have: focus, gain thinking, and virtuosity.

(16:55): There are more—like patience and abundance mindset and evidence-based decision making and healthy skepticism and the practice mindset and more. We teach these in our mentorship program even if we don’t always call them out. What’s that mean? Well, skills compound, you can’t be taxed on them. You can’t lose them in a breakup. Your landlord can’t increase your rent as you get them. Building skills is really what makes you a good entrepreneur for life. And the best way to build your skills is to work with a mentor to practice focus and gain thinking, build momentum, and stay true to being virtuous about the virtuosity element of your business. Keep it simple. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you want to talk more about entrepreneurial skills, go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free group where we talk about this stuff all the time, and you can ask questions of me and my team.

The post The 3 Essential Business Skills Every Gym Owner Must Have appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Top Skills for Gym Owners: Focus for the Win

Building a good gym requires strategy, tactics and skills.

Strategies are your overarching plans—like your business plan.

Tactics are the things you use to implement that plan—like using an email list to retain clients.

Skills are what make you good at doing that stuff long term.

In our mentorship practice, we give you step-by-step tactics to grow your gym, then we build long-term strategies and help you act on them.

But we also teach entrepreneurial skills because skills have compounding value. They become more valuable over time. Here’s why:

1. A little bit of each skill is helpful, but a high-skill level pays off even more.

2. No one can copy them—they’re an unassailable advantage.

3. The government can’t tax you on them.

4. You don’t lose them. If one business fails, these skills will build the next faster.

5. They can be improved regardless of outcome (if you win, you learn; if you lose, you learn).

6. They multiply your other investments.

7. The time and effort invested to learn them has lifelong returns.

The Most Essential Skill for Gym Owners

The first skill that every gym owner needs is focus.

Focus is a skill that will multiply your return on everything you do to grow your business.

The gym owners who get the best ROI in our mentorship program often say “I just did what my mentor told me.” That’s because they do one thing at a time and don’t get distracted by anything else.

And the owners who get the lowest ROI often say “I’m just too busy to do the work!” That’s because they’re distracted by social media, facebook groups, their staff, five podcasts every day, two audiobooks … . They just can’t dedicate 30 uninterrupted minutes to doing the work that will actually grow the gym.

Of course, both groups have the same amount of work, but the top earners have the skill of focus.

Usually, these are people who have a family, own a business and also train hard. The most focused sometimes have multiple “fields of play,” each of which is important enough to warrant their full attention. So they’re not just running a business but also raising kids or pets and doing triathlons.

Some clients don’t have strong focus skills, but they can force a deep focus when required. These are people (like me) who do their best work right before a deadline. These clients can be really successful with our RampUp program because of the high accountability, but they’ll never be successful just by reading books or listening to podcasts. They won’t benefit from a group coaching program unless they’re in it for a very long time. They’re a bit slower than the first group, but they’ll get there.

Others don’t have any focus skills, and they’re overwhelmed and stressed all the time. In most cases, 1:1 mentorship is their only hope. In these cases, the mentor must use frequent touch points—almost daily. Or these people can make appointments with themselves to do the work and show their mentor when they have “focus blocks” planned. Clients like this might benefit from scheduled “open office hours” where they just show up and work. But they won’t benefit from getting a new task or idea every month.

The great news is that focus isn’t a gift you inherit; it’s a skill you build.

Start by getting an office with a door that closes. Spend at least one hour there every day. Leave your phone outside the door.

My rule: Every day, do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. It’s the only way I can dedicate my focus to growing my business. If I wait until I’m at work, I’ll lose my focus on the ride there—the phone will ring or I’ll get an idea from a podcast or I’ll ruminate on stuff and build a checklist of urgent tasks that need doing.

In the following post in this series, I’ll describe the next skill gym owners need—gain thinking—and explain how you can get it.

The post Top Skills for Gym Owners: Focus for the Win appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Hard Truths if You Want to Serve 1,000 Clients

Can you have a successful microgym with 500, 700 or even 1,000 clients?

Yes.

But it’s really hard.

I recently spoke with a Two-Brain client who has more than 1,100 members across two locations.

Below, I’ll tell you what I learned from him.

Daniel Dobbs Brown runs Accion CrossFit Providencia and Las Condes in Santiago, Chile. Those gyms took the first and fourth spots, respectively, on our leaderboard for client count in August.

Daniel joined me on “Run a Profitable Gym” to talk about his huge numbers, and a few things stood out.

Huge Client Counts Require Huge Teams

Daniel told me he has 50-55 people on his team, including about 30 coaches.

Imagine that for a minute: You probably opened a gym because you liked teaching people how to squat. I did that, too. But it’s a long, long way from leading a team of 50 people.

If you want to run a gym with a lot of clients, you will need to evolve from fitness coach to CEO and leader of people.

Retention Is a Challenge

Daniel’s an inspiring, passionate guy who wants to help as many people as he can. I was fired up after hearing him speak, and I was amazed at all the programs he has and ideas he’s working on to improve health and fitness in Chile.

One of his challenges in accomplishing his mission is getting people to keep working out, and Daniel’s got a plan to address churn and retain clients longer so he can change their lives.

But the reality is that clients leave, and a few percentage points have a huge effect when you’re talking about 1,100 members. Daniel told me his monthly churn rate is between 12 and 13 percent—he’s working to bring it into the 5-7 percent range with the help of a new client success manager (and a mentor).

But if you do the math, you’ll realize that even at 5 percent churn, Daniel would still need to acquire 57 clients a month to maintain his headcount.

Which brings me to my next point.

You Must Be Good at Marketing

Daniel is very good at acquiring lots of clients every month.

Are you?

If not, you must become a marketing master if you want to have a huge number of clients. You’ll have to replace the clients who leave and you’ll have to acquire many others to grow. Some gym owners can do that, but others can’t. That’s understandable: Sales and marketing require a new skill set, and usually a number of talented team members.

It’s certainly not a mistake to want to help a lot of people become healthier, but it’s a mistake to try and do it without realizing clients won’t just show up in droves. You’ll have to work very hard to acquire them—and keep them.

Retention and Value Are Huge Multipliers

With any group of clients, length of engagement (LEG) and average revenue per member (ARM) are multipliers.

Consider increasing your ARM from $200 to $205 if you have 150 clients—that’s $750 in new revenue each month. And if each of those clients stays just one extra month and pays $205 because you’re better at retaining them, that’s another $30,750 in revenue.

Wow, right?

Daniel’s current ARM is about US$85-$90, which is actually double that of other gyms in the area.

He’s working hard to improve the value of coaching in his market, and this is his next target: $120 ARM. A $30 jump in ARM with 1,140 clients is $34,200 a month.

And if each clients stays a month longer at $120, that’s $136,800. These are big numbers.

Start Small and Build

I’d suggest Daniel is an outlier—a rare entrepreneur who can operate at large scale.

My head was spinning at the end of my chat with him. At peak, I had about 230 members in my gym, and I found even that number overwhelming. So it was inspiring to talk with a guy who can manage team of 50, help more than a thousand clients and use large-scale marketing systems to reach even more people.

But I know that I don’t have the skill set to serve that many people—and that’s OK. With my skill set, it was much better to focus on providing huge value to fewer clients who stuck around for a long time. That model worked for me, just as Daniel’s finding success going big.

The best plan? Whatever your goals are, start by acquiring 150 clients who pay you $205 a month and stay for two years or more. If you hit those numbers, you’ll earn $100,000 a year as owner, and you’ll have a strong business.

At that point, you can increase any or all of those numbers slowly without overwhelming your team or your business systems. For you, it might be 200 clients with pay $300 a month and stay for three years. Daniel wants 5,000 clients eventually!

Whatever your ultimate goals are, start with these targets—150 people at $205. First build a strong gym that will allow you to scale up with confidence—if you want to. At that point, and with the guidance of a mentor, you can do whatever you want.

The post Hard Truths if You Want to Serve 1,000 Clients appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Help First: The Idea That Changes Every Gym Owner’s Approach to Marketing

Chris Cooper (00:00):
When you’re growing the number of clients at your gym, it’s really important to get good at the basics and to keep coming back to them over time. In 2017, I wrote this book, “Help First,” to outline my marketing strategy in growing my gym, Catalyst. And every year I reread this to remind myself to keep doing this stuff that actually works to grow my gym. Just like you, I’m tempted to try the new TikTok thing or Threads or whatever it is. I love doing that stuff, but the reality is that if I ever need new clients, I go back to this because there are so many tactics in there that work and have worked over time that sometimes I forget them myself. So today I’m gonna talk about what’s in “Help First.” I’m gonna share some of those tactics with you, and I’m gonna help you grow your gym.

Chris Cooper (00:44):
I’m Chris Cooper, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And today we’re talking about some of my favorite lessons from my book “Help First.” So first off in the book is the question that all gym owners need to start with, and that is “who is my client?” Okay? And I’ve got this page folded because I read it so often myself. The thing that was hard for me to understand as a gym owner was that I am not my own best client. If you think about it, you know, when I was starting out as a gym owner and for the first five years before I found a mentor, I was somebody who was overworked. I had no time. I was working 6 a.m. Till 9 at night. I was underpaid. I was making $40 to $45 grand a year. I couldn’t afford my service. And so what that did was it put me in this mindset of scarcity, and I projected my wallet onto all of my clients.

Chris Cooper (01:34):
“Wow, My service is so expensive. Wow, they’re not gonna want to come twice a week. Wow, they’re not gonna listen to me. I’ve gotta try and make this as cheap as I can.” And then when I opened a CrossFit gym, I extrapolated my budget onto the CrossFitters. “Hey, I couldn’t afford $135 a month for unlimited. How cheap can I make this for them?” And so what you have to realize is that you are not your own best client. And in the book I actually walk you through the steps to figuring out who those best clients are, what they have in common, and how to tailor your service to them. That’s the really big thing. Then I go into the obstacles that actually stop us from selling. And the number one is our mindset. We feel like selling has to be this like slimy, reprehensible practice that’s done by people who wanna trick us.

Chris Cooper (02:23):
But selling is really coaching when you think about it. Convincing somebody to start your service is the first act of coaching that you will ever get to perform with them. And if that act of coaching doesn’t go well, if you don’t coach them into starting, you can’t coach them on the next thing, the air squat or the plank or whatever your next move is. It’s really critical to be a good coach the first time you meet somebody. And that means encouraging them to sign up for your product. And so in this section of the book, when I’m talking about obstacles to helping, one of the biggest obstacles is within our own head. And I talked to you about how to go past this and overcome it. So that’s one of the big obstacles that’s stopping people. Another one is our misunderstanding of value.

Chris Cooper (03:11):
See, we think that the value is in the fine details of what we sell. It’s in the programming, it’s in like the intensity, it’s in the community. But really the value to our clients is stopping them from having another heart attack making them strong enough to pick up their 6-year-old granddaughter so she can hang the star on the Christmas tree. It’s really not feeling like crap when they take off their shirt at the pool or feeling like maybe “my wife is kind of fooling around on me with that ripped dude at the office.” You know, it’s that reduction of fear and the feeling of confidence that we’re giving people, and that’s our actual value. When you think about the value that you provide to people in that sense, it’s a lot easier to say, “Hey, I’m willing to overcome my own fears about rejection, my own shortcomings, my own scarcity mindset to do this amazing thing for this amazing person.”

Chris Cooper (04:04):
And that’s really another big obstacle. And then a third one is just you don’t know what to charge. And that’s really where a mentor can help. I’ve got a couple of very specific strategies in here. And so the book is not all about philosophy. It’s not just beating the dead horse—you know you need to sell by this point. It’s really tactical. And so one of the tactics that I’ve got folded here is help the kids. So if you really wanna retain a client, the best thing that you can do is something for their kids. You know, if you’ve got a client who’s kind of like me in your gym, I don’t need a 20 percent discount. I don’t need a birthday card. They’re nice—whatever. They’re an acknowledgement. But the reality is if you remember my kid’s birthday, I am your fan for life.

Chris Cooper (04:48):
Like, that’s a step that very few people go to. And another way to think about this is how can you help my kids get fitter and healthier and gain confidence and find friends that will support all of those things with them? Well, you can run a kids program, but even if you don’t run a kids program, you can do something nice for my kids, and like once a quarter, have a family day or a kids day where you run an obstacle course. So while running a kids program is amazing, it’s just so great for your clients and their kids and their family. You don’t have to run it to help their kids. The key of help first, honestly, the meta lesson, is look for places where you can help beyond just delivering your service. And that’s how you grow. You extend your help to more people and you extend your help deeper within the people that you have.

Chris Cooper (05:37):
So that was one strategy. Another one, you know, that’s also related, is helping local teams. And so I’ve got the exact script here that you would use if, let’s say, the example in the book, I’ll read it to you, is Jill’s daughter plays on a local soccer team. You will say this: “Jill, I just wanted to thank you for bringing all of your friends in here. It’s so awesome. Now, I know your daughter’s team is just starting soccer practices for the season. Do you think they’d like to come in for a free mobility drill after practice? So if their practice is at 5 p.m. And they’re done at 6:30, I’ll wait here. They can all come up. I’m gonna teach ’em some mobility and some stretching—the stuff the coaches don’t really wanna get into. Or I can give them a seminar and I can come to them and I can talk to them and their parents about nutrition.”

Chris Cooper (06:25):
And again, this tactic and this actual script is in this book because I’ve used it and it works. In fact, I can think of an exact example here. So this wasn’t a soccer team, although I did work with a lot of soccer players. This was actually hockey. And I approached this hockey coach who’d been around for about 40 years and said, “I know you’re working with the teams. I’m not gonna come in and talk to you about strength and conditioning. You know what you’re doing, right? What I can do is I’ll come in and talk to the parents about nutrition.” And he said, “Okay, great, yeah, do that.” So while he had the kids on the ice, he set us up in a back stinky locker room where they had like all this equipment stored, and I did Q and A for parents about nutrition. What should the kids eat before the game?

Chris Cooper (07:09):
What should they eat after the game? One parent asked me about the Zone Diet, you know, whatever. We did an amazing Q and A. I handed out business cards back then, and we got some clients out of it. In that case, the kids were pretty young, but I got a bunch of the parents. And as the kids grew, you know, eventually you get those parents, too. So again, the line is right in here. In my town, a lot of coaches are nervous about sharing their team. They don’t want an outside expert coming in and making them look dumb or outdated or ignorant, but if you approach it from an angle that they don’t really care about, like nutrition or mobility, they’re all for it. It looks like they’re adding extra value to their team, And they’re getting it for free, right? So that’s great.

Chris Cooper (07:51):
And then there’s a whole bunch here, too. So another one is we published a free guide on our website called “How to Feed a Hockey Animal.” And it’s because I did that seminar for the parents. I made up this little one-pager and then I just put it on my site for people to get for free. And we actually give this to people in Two-Brain now—a template, an example to use. And then what happened in December 2014, I was delivering a short seminar at this local electricity company. And after a short monologue on high-intensity interval training, a staff member put up their hand and asked, “Hey, I saw that you had this handout that you give to all the kids, where you talk about hockey. How do I get that?” So I just said, “Oh, well, here you go.”

Chris Cooper (08:30):
And I told ’em how to get it on the site, and all the parents downloaded it. It became my first lead magnet. So there’s another great example here. But there’s other strategies in here, too. Like a great one is thanking the everyday heroes. So when I first understood that I need to get my target demographic dialed in better, I realized really quickly that I had a lot of nurses in my gym, and I started talking to them and saying like, “Hey, you know, I love having you in this gym. I love that half of your shift comes over here after work, and we do this class, but like, why is that?” And they said, “Well, hey, nurses tend to hang out with each other after shift because we’re all in these same shifts. We get each other’s problems.” And I realized teachers are the same way and police officers are the same way.

Chris Cooper (09:21):
So instead of just offering a blanket discount to nurses, what we would do is host nurses week. And we would say to our nurses in the gym during that week, “Why don’t we invite your friends to come in, and we’re gonna run a special 10 a.m. Class just for nurses and their friends when the shift ends during that week. They can try it, and then we’ll book a No Sweat Intro for them at the end of the class. Now, the first couple times I did this, I screwed it up. I didn’t run the No Sweat Intro. I just thought it was a free trial and they would throw their credit card at me if they liked it. After I did it a few times, though, I learned book everybody into a No Sweat Intro at the end of the week. And of course I put those lessons in the book, too, so you don’t have to go through the trial and error.

Chris Cooper (10:02):
The scripts are right there. Here’s exactly what to say, here’s how to promote it. Okay? And then there’s other bubbles in here, too. Another great one was co-branding. And you know we’ve got a few bridal shops in our city, and what we would do … . So first we had this bridal party come in, and they wanted to make a six-week group to get them ready for the wedding, get them more fit. They were going on this destination wedding, and they wanted to look good at the pool. And so we trained them up for six weeks. They loved it. It was a great bonding experience. And then I realized, “Wow, these, these ladies are all going together to the bridal shop to get their dresses. They’re all going together to the hairdresser to get their hair done. They’re all going to get their nails done.”

Chris Cooper (10:46):
I’m pretty sure they were all getting artificial tans. Those are all connection points who see more and more of these bridal parties than I ever would, so why don’t I talk to them? And so we made connections with the bridal shop and the manicurist and the hairdresser and said like, “Hey, here’s a great opportunity for us to recommend one another.” So eventually what would happen is we would get a referral from the bridal shop. They would come in and talk to us about a training plan for their bridal party. And we would say, “Who’s your hairdresser?” And then we’d refer them to the next person in the loop. And it kind of created this loop. The only downside was that hairdressers, manicurists and bridal shops who weren’t in that loop started to get a little bit jealous about it. So you have to be very careful, but having a one-on-one relationship with any of those people is always good, okay?

Chris Cooper (11:35):
Just having these conversations to start is great. And we call that co-branding. And there’s a bunch of examples of that in this book, “Help First,” of how you can do it. You can even put up banners. You can work with car shops. When we had our gym in the industrial park, we had this great deal for our members. So there was an oil-change place like three driveways up the road. I’m picturing it on the left-hand side. And the deal with the members was if you want your oil changed during your lunch break, all you gotta do is call the oil-change shop, make an appointment, and then just show up at the gym. Drop your keys on the front desk. The oil-change shop will come down, grab your keys, take your car, change your oil, bring your car back, and just drop your keys back on the desk. And then you can leave a check with your keys or they’ll call you later and get your credit-card number. Very simple, right? It really benefited the oil-change place more than it benefited us, but it really helped our members because now they didn’t have to make the choice between coming to the gym or getting their oil changed at lunch. And if you can do that with cafés, if you can do that with other convenient services, you’re laughing. You could do that with car detailing, too, right? Like, there’s a lot of services out there that didn’t really exist. Then I talk about blog posts. And what’s really crazy is when I wrote this in 2017, I had been publishing a blog for close to 20 years already. Now, of course, you can use AI bots to do a lot of this work for you, but even back then I was saying like, “Here’s exactly how to write a blog post.”

Chris Cooper (13:09):
So you could copy this page of the book into ChatGPT 4.0, use it as a prompt and it would spit out blog post after blog post for you, right? It’s like I’ve programmed the robots for you here. I’ve even got how to do media, how to focus on your exact target audience, how to talk to groups, how to talk to teams, how to expand your audience. So once you know who your niche is, like how to grow that niche … . Back then there really wasn’t an opportunity to grow online. But now of course there is. How to establish authority locally. So how to partner. One of our greatest initiatives ever that’s been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to us was we used to just take lunch to local physical therapists. We would take lunch to heir team. So they might have a massage therapist, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, and we would just talk about different training.

Chris Cooper (14:03):
And we’d say, “What do you recommend your clients for this?” And they would say, “How come you guys are doing CrossFit?” or whatever. And sometimes we would leave them with a little how-to-do-a-squat brochure with a link to a video that their clients could just take and share. And all of these ideas came out of these lunch meetings. And the referrals that we have had just from one of these alone has been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, including some where we bill insurance. Okay? And then finally what I talk about in this book is how to build a marketing strategy. And it’s really like—there’s so many ideas in here, so many tactics that you could just copy verbatim and read … .You know, it’s hard. Like it’s hard to do ’em all. There’s so many.

Chris Cooper (14:44):
The overwhelming lesson, though, is that you must take on a mindset of help first, and then you must build a plan to fit in these things that you can do without feeling like a slime ball. For example, the first time that I ever took coffee to my new neighbors, I was so nervous. I don’t know what I was scared of. Like, “They’re gonna kick me out. They’re gonna laugh at me.” No. What happened was I walked in with good coffee and said, “Hey, I’m Chris. I just opened up the gym. How’s business?” And most of the time the owner would come outta the back and they’d wanna stand there and drink the coffee with me. So, you know, I had to start limiting myself to one or two of these a week because I was just drinking so much coffee that I was outta control.

Chris Cooper (15:27):
And learning how to drink coffee really hot, too. But even if you’re just talking to their staff, like you’re not selling them anything, you’re just taking them a coffee, you’re making a new friend, you’re saying “good morning. Hey, welcome.” Everybody’s always happy to see the person with free coffee. You don’t have to close them or convince them of anything. You just have to leave ’em with these warm feelings. And then next time somebody walks into the autobody shop or the hairdresser and they say “hey, what do you know about that gym across the road?” what do you think they’re gonna say? “They’re Awesome.” And you’re gonna create kind of this like black-hole funnel within your community. This actually works. You know, a lot of people are really spending a lot of their time thinking about the best marketing strategy on Facebook.

Chris Cooper (16:11):
“What’s The best ad copy?” The best ad copy is looking somebody in the eye, shaking their hand and saying “good morning.” And if you can do that every single day or even two or three times a week, eventually you’re going to build an unstoppable funnel of clients who know, you like you and trust you. I’m Chris Cooper. Look, if my gym ever needs more clients, I go back to the basics. I read my own notes to myself that I was doing in 2017 to really grow my gym, Catalyst. And I go back to those and I practice them over and over. It’s real easy to overthink marketing, but really you can do it if you stick to the basics. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Stick to the basics, make friends. People are going to like you. I Promise.

The post Help First: The Idea That Changes Every Gym Owner’s Approach to Marketing appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Retention and Reacquisition: Do You Talk to Current and Former Clients?

If you want improved retention at your gym, you must start more conversations.

And if you want departed clients to come back, you must reach out to them.

You have to feed your relationships to keep them alive. You feed all relationships with conversations.

Starting Conversations With Current Clients

If you’re not asking clients about their goals and tracking their progress, they will stop training with you.

The fix: Take your five best clients out for coffee one by one.

Start with these questions:

“What led you to my gym in the first place?”“What else have you tried that you didn’t like as much?”“How can I serve you more?”

Then tell each client’s story. Interview them individually and make them famous on your website and social channels. (We teach clients exactly how to do this with step-by-step instructions.)

Then move to the rest of your clients. Book quarterly Goal Review Sessions with each of them to talk about their goals and measure their progress. (We teach the Goal Review process to clients as well.)

Remember, the people who joined your gym aren’t just going to stay forever if you don’t talk to them regularly. Lack of conversation is the No. 1 predictor of divorce—in marriage and in business.

Starting Conversations With Former Clients

If you genuinely care about people, you’ll check in on them—even if the relationship isn’t “perfect” right now.

Maybe your feelings were hurt when a client left. But unless they burned the bridge on the way out, they’re probably going to come back someday—and they might be waiting on an invitation.

Start with a story: “Hey, Jane. I was just remembering the time … .”

Or, “Hey, John, a memory just popped up on my Facebook feed. … Remember that time? How are things going?”

We shut out former clients because our egos are bruised when they leave. We feel like we need to “win” the relationship. But you don’t need to win the battle to win overall. You win when they come back. And so do they because they start moving toward their fitness goals again.

Of course, you don’t want about 10 percent of former clients to come back. If someone wasn’t a good fit for your business, don’t restart the conversation. Just let the story end.

So … What’s My Lead-Nurture Strategy?

I started this series on conversation marketing with a question:

“Coop, what’s your lead-nurture process?”

Here’s my process:

Tell a story.Start a conversation.If the conversation is positive, invite a potential client to take the next step.

But everything starts with a story.

Tell stories regularly and you’ll start more conversations. If you do that, you’ll acquire—and retain—more clients.

The post Retention and Reacquisition: Do You Talk to Current and Former Clients? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Conversation Marketing: New Sign-Ups in 4 Simple Steps

Trust is built through conversations.

Conversations bridge the gap between advertising and sales.

You can call it “affinity building” or “lead nurture”—whatever you want. But we’re all in the relationship business, so we have to be good at this.

Step 1: Start a Conversation

To meet someone new, you must “go first.” Good entrepreneurs aren’t always great salespeople, but they’re always good at making someone feel welcome and heard.

That means sharing a personal story online or offering your hand to shake in person.

Here’s exactly how to do it:

1. In Person

My favourite new-friend “pickup line?”

“Good morning.”

This was not an easy skill for me to learn. I’ve always been shy and introverted. But wishing someone a “good morning” is risk-free. No one will say “get lost.” Offering a hand to shake is irresistible, even in the post-COVID era.

Try this: Pick up four coffees at a local drive-thru. Walk next door to the business closest to yours. Hand over the coffee and say “Good morning! I’m Chris from next door.” They’ll respond—usually with a question. Answer the question and take it from there.

2. Online

Make a “milestone” post.

Like this: “Today is my 50th consecutive day of cycling!” or “As of today, I’ve worked out at least three times a week for five years straight!”

The milestone doesn’t matter as much as the sharing. Include a number!

When people comment on your post, ask if they’ve ever tried what you’ve been doing or achieved something similar. Move to private chat when it’s warranted.

We learned this strategy from Richmond Dinh in our Tinker program. It works because “milestone posts” tell a story. The more stories you tell, the more conversations you start.

Step 2: Listen

Get them talking.

Here’s the reason we’re all scared to start a conversation with a stranger: We don’t know what to say.

The solution? Listen instead of talking about yourself!

Try these “Feel-good questions” from Bob Burg, author of “The Go-Giver”:

Bob Burg’s 10 Feel-Good Questions®“How did you get your start in the widget business?”“What do you enjoy most about your profession?”“What separates you and your company from the competition?”“What advice would you give someone just starting in the widget business?”“What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail?”“What significant changes have you seen take place in your profession through the years?”“What do you see as the coming trends in the widget business?”“Can you describe the strangest or funniest incident you’ve experienced in your business?”“What ways have you found to be the most effective for promoting your business?”“What one sentence would you like people to use in describing the way you do business?”

Step 3: Invite

If you believe you have a great coach-client fit, tell them so and invite them to take the first step.

In person: “Those are great goals. I have an idea. Why don’t we work out together at my gym? Just you and me. How’s Thursday?”

Online: “I think I can help. I’m making my schedule up for next week, and I have an opening on Thursday at 4 p.m. Would you be open to talking about the next step?”

(We provide a full sell-by-chat template in our Growth and Tinker programs.)

Step 4: Sign Them Up

Start changing their lives!

In person (face to face or Zoom): Ask about their goal. Find out why that goal is important to them. Make a prescription to get them to their goal. Tell them the price. Receive their money and start delivering on your promises.

(We provide a full No Sweat Intro template in our RampUp and Growth programs.)

Start Talking!

To become clients, people must know you, like you and trust you. Conversations help you check each box.

Advertising might start the conversation, but advertising is a monologue. Conversations are a dialogue.

Your goals:

Start conversations.Guide conversations.Build relationships.

Every relationship you have must be fed or it will weaken. Feed relationships with conversations.

The post Conversation Marketing: New Sign-Ups in 4 Simple Steps appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Conversation Marketing: How to Chat and Grow Your Gym

Chris Cooper (00:00):
I once got this email: “Hey, Coop, can you tell me how your lead nurture process works for Two-Brain?” I had to smile because this is the answer: “You’re in it.” I’m Chris Cooper, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today I’m gonna tell you about how I start and carry on conversations every single day on our many platforms and how that same strategy can work to grow your gym. So at Two-Brain, you might know this already, but we publish three to five blogs a week. We send three to five email messages to tens of thousands of people every week. We air podcasts and videos like this one on the “Run a Profitable Gym” YouTube, and podcast channels. And I also jump into our free group gymownersunited.com to answer questions and share resources wherever I can. We also publish a host of snack-sized tidbits on multiple social-media platforms every day.

Chris Cooper (00:55):
And every single day I get Facebook messages from 30 to 40 different people asking for one of our free guides or resources. It’s all part of my conversations with friends like you. And get this: the average person has a six-month conversation with me before they buy anything from me. Usually people wind up asking for mentorship when the time is right for them, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait to start the conversation. So today I’m gonna talk about having conversations and how that’s what really marketing is. If you wanna get good at marketing, you have to get good at conversations of all sorts. On all modern platforms, conversations bridge the gap between advertising and sales. Now, advertising gets somebody’s attention. Sales gets their money. But the space in between the two has always been clouded in mystery. Like the business plan of the Underpants Gnomes from “South Park.” They have this business plan that’s like Phase 1: steal underpants. Phase 3: profit. What’s Phase 2 for them?

Chris Cooper (01:58):
And for us it’s conversations. Conversation marketing is part content marketing, part lively chat and part persuasion. Some would call it a lead-nurture strategy or trust building. I just call it winning hearts and minds. Before people will buy from you, they have to know you, like you and trust you. And how do you get to know someone? How do you grow to like them? How is trust built over time? Through conversations. So today I’m gonna give you some tactics to bridge the gap between awareness—where they’ve heard of you from your advertising and purchase—and where they buy from you through your sales process. So we’re gonna do this in four simple steps, and this is how we get from ads or awareness through conversations into signing up. Alright, so I just said that trust is built through conversations. Conversations bridge the gap between advertising and sales.

Chris Cooper (02:52):
And you can call it affinity building or lead nurture—whatever you want. But we’re all in the relationship business, so we have to be good at this. So here are the four stages to conversation, marketing. Step 1, obviously, start a conversation. To meet somebody new, you have to go first. Good entrepreneurs aren’t always great salespeople, but they’re always good at making somebody feel welcome and heard. And that might mean sharing a personal story online or offering your hand to shake in person. It means going first, being the one to say, “Good morning. Hi, I’m Chris.” You know, offering to shake their hand. Here’s exactly how to do it in person. My favorite new-friend introduction pickup line is “good morning.” Now, this was not actually an easy skill for me to learn. I’ve always been shy, maybe a bit introverted, but wishing somebody a good morning is risk-free, right?

Chris Cooper (03:47):
Nobody’s gonna say, “Get lost. I wanna have a crappy morning.” And offering a hand to shake is irresistible, even in like a post-COVID world. So try this. Pick up four coffees at your local coffee drivethru, then walk next door to the business closest to you. Hand over the coffee and say, “Good morning! I’m Chris from the gym next door.” And they’ll respond usually with a question, and then just answer the question and have a conversation. Take it from there. If you’re gonna do this online, you can make a milestone post like this: “Today is my 50th consecutive day of cycling,” or, “As of today, I’ve worked out at least three times a week for five years straight.” Now the milestone doesn’t matter as much as the sharing. So include some kind of number, and when people comment on your post, ask if they’ve ever tried what you’ve been doing or achieved something similar, and then move to a private chat to carry it on out of the public eye.

Chris Cooper (04:43):
Now we learned this strategy from Richmond Dinh in our Tinker Program a couple years ago, and we’ve been using it ever since. It works because milestone posts tell a story and start a conversation. And the more stories you tell, the more conversations you start. So Step 1 is start the conversation. Step 2 is listen. Your job is to get the other person talking. Here’s the reason we’re all scared to start a conversation with a stranger: we don’t know what to say. The solution is to just listen instead of talking about yourself. So here are some feel-good questions from Bob Burg, the author of “The Go-Giver,” to get other people talking. These are his 10 feel-good questions, with a little trademark symbol beside them. So here we go. How did you get a start in the widget business, the gym business, whatever. What do you enjoy most about your profession?

Chris Cooper (05:35):
What separates you and your company from the competition? What advice would you give someone just starting in the widget business? What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail? What significant changes have you seen take place in your profession through the years? What do you see as the coming trends in the widget business? Can you describe the strangest or funniest incident you’ve ever experienced in your business? What ways have you found to be the most effective for promoting your business? And what one sentence would you like people to use in describing the way you do business? Okay, so Step 1 is start the conversation. Step 2 is listen. Step 3 is invite them, make them an invitation. If you believe that you’ve got a potential good fit for your gym or your business, tell ’em so and invite them to take the first step.

Chris Cooper (06:31):
So in person you would say exactly this: “Hey, those are great goals. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we work out together at my gym, just you and me? How’s Thursday?” Online, if you’re doing a chat, you could say, “Hey, I think I could help. I’m making up my schedule for next week, and I have an opening on Thursday at 4 p.m. Would you be open to talking about the next step?” Now of course, we provide a full sell-by-chat template in our Growth and Tinker programs, but you should just feel like you’re having a natural conversation when you do it in person or online. So Step 4 is sign them up and start changing their lives. If you’re in person talking to somebody at your gym, ask about their goal and find out why that goal is important to them. Make a prescription and get them to their goal.

Chris Cooper (07:15):
Then tell them the price, receive their money, and start delivering on your promises. And, of course, we provide a full No Sweat Intro template in our RampUp and Growth programs. The key to all this is just to start talking. To become your clients, people must know you, like you and trust you. Conversations help you check each box. Advertising might start the conversation or get you a bit of attention, but advertising is a monologue. It’s one direction. Conversations are a dialogue. So your goals are to start more conversations, to guide more conversations, and then to build relationships. Every relationship that you have must be fed or it will weaken, and you feed relationships with conversations, too. So now I’ve just talked about how to get clients with conversations. Now I’m gonna tell you how to keep clients and build retention with conversations. And we’re also gonna talk about reactivation, bringing former clients back.

Chris Cooper (08:12):
If you want improved retention at your gym, you have to start more conversations with your current clients. And if you want your departed clients to come back, you gotta reach out to them. You have to feed those relationships to keep them alive. And you feed all relationships with conversations. So let’s start with your current clients. How do you start more conversations with them? Well, if you’re not asking clients about their goals and then tracking their progress, they’ll stop training with you. That’s the first hint. So the fix is this: Take your five best clients out for coffee one by one, and then start the conversation with these questions. What led you to my gym in the first place? What else have you tried that you didn’t like as much? And then how can I help you with the rest of your lifestyle more?

Chris Cooper (09:01):
Then you want to interview them, you wanna make ’em famous, you wanna build them up, and you wanna tell their story. So you interview them on your phone, and then you share that to your social-media channels and your website. And, of course, we teach our clients exactly how to do this with step-by-step instructions. And then you move to the rest of your clients after your top five and you book quarterly Goal Review Sessions with each of them to talk about their goals and measure their progress. And, of course, we teach the goal-review process in our mentorship practice as well. Remember, though, that the people who joined your gym aren’t just gonna stay forever if you don’t talk to them regularly. Lack of conversation is the number one predictor of divorce in marriage and in business. All right, let’s talk about starting conversations with former clients.

Chris Cooper (09:44):
If you genuinely care about people, you will show them by checking in on them even if your relationship isn’t perfect right now. So maybe your feelings got hurt when a client left. Maybe it felt like a breakup, but unless they burned the bridge on their way out, they’re probably gonna come back someday, and they might just be waiting on an invitation to come back. So start with a story. Send them a message: “Hey, Jane, I was just remembering the time we did that big Murph workout on Boxing Day at my gym. You remember that?” Or, “Hey, John, a memory just popped up on my Facebook feed. Remember that time that you did a hundred box jumps in a row? How are things going?” We shut our former clients out because our egos get bruised when they leave. We feel like we need to win the relationship or get closure, but you don’t.

Chris Cooper (10:32):
You don’t need to win the battle to win overall. You win when they come back, and so do they because they start moving toward their fitness goals again. Of course, there’s about 10% of your clients who are former clients that you don’t want back. And if somebody wasn’t a good fit for your business, then just don’t restart the conversation. Let it die. Just let the story end. So I started this podcast, this video by talking about my lead-nurture strategy for Two-Brain, right? Somebody asked me, “Coop, what’s your lead-nurture process?” So here’s my process again. Tell a story, start a conversation. If the conversation is positive on both sides, invite a potential client to take the next step. But everything starts with a story. Tell stories regularly and you’ll start more conversations. And if you do that, you’ll acquire and retain more clients. I’m Chris Cooper. The story is the key to everything else. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if you wanna start more conversations with me, with our mentor team, with other people in Two-Brain and other gym owners around the world, just go to gymownersunited.com. Join that free group and you’ll be immediately immersed in the highest value conversation that a gym owner can have.

The post Conversation Marketing: How to Chat and Grow Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Conversation Marketing: Winning Hearts and Minds

I once got this email: “Hey, Coop, can you tell me how your lead-nurture process works for Two-Brain?”

I had to smile.

Why?

Because this is the answer: “You’re in it.”

I start and carry on conversations every single day on Two-Brain’s many platforms:

We publish three to five blogs a week.We send three to five email messages to tens of thousands of people every week.We air podcasts and videos on the “Run a Profitable Gym” platforms.I jump into Gym Owners United to answer questions and share resources wherever I can.We publish a host of snack-sized tidbits on multiple social-media platforms every day.Every single day, I get Facebook messages from 30-40 different people asking for guides or resources.

It’s all part of my conversations with friends like you.

And get this: The average person has a six-month conversation with me before buying anything from me. Usually, people wind up asking for mentorship when the time is right for them.

Building Bridges

If you want to get good at marketing, you have to get good at conversations of all sorts on all modern platforms.

Conversations bridge the gap between advertising and sales.

Advertising gets someone’s attention. Sales gets their money. But the space between the two has always been clouded in mystery—like the business plan of the Underpants Gnomes from “South Park.”

Phase 1: Steal underpants.

Phase 3: Profit.

What’s Phase 2?

Phase 2 is conversations.

Conversation marketing is part content marketing, part lively chat and part persuasion. Some would call it a “lead-nurture strategy” or “trust building.” I call it “winning hearts and minds.”

Before people will buy from you, they have to know you, like you and trust you. How do you get to know someone? How do you grow to like them? And how is trust built over time?

Through conversations.

In this series, I’m going to give you some tactics to bridge the gap between awareness (they’ve heard of you) and purchase.

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