Chris Cooper's Blog, page 67

Gym Marketing Metrics: How to Measure and Improve Them

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Is your marketing actually working? I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if you’re not measuring these four marketing metrics, it’s impossible to know. So first I’m gonna tell you what to measure, then I’m gonna tell you how the best in the world are tracking at these metrics, and then I’m gonna tell you exactly how to fix them. So this is how you fix your funnel, and it all starts with measuring where the problems might be. So let’s start with leads. Leads are the people who land on your website. They could be coming from your or organic media, from your social media or from your paid ads, but they get to your website. The next thing we wanna measure is set rate. And these are the number of people who visit your site and then take the next step and set an appointment.

Chris Cooper (00:49):
So these are people who are interested enough to sit down and hear your pitch. They book a No Sweat Intro with you. The third metric is show rate: The number of people who book an appointment and then actually show up for it. Sadly, this is rarely a hundred percent. The people who show are the ones who are serious about signing up. They are yours to lose. And the fourth metric to measure is your close rate. This is the number of people who buy. Now, none of these four metrics will be a perfect a hundred percent at any time. However, if you know these numbers, then you can diagnose the problems in your marketing. For example, a lot of people will say things like “Facebook ads don’t work for me.” But they’re not measuring how many people go from the Facebook ad to the their website, or they’re not measuring how many people who hit their website actually book an appointment or how many of those people actually show up or how many of those who show up actually sign up.

Chris Cooper (01:45):
So the problem might not be Facebook marketing at all. Zuckerberg might be doing a great job, but you’re not converting the people who get to the website, and those people aren’t booking an appointment, and then those people aren’t showing up. You don’t know until you measure. So we actually measure these metrics separately, and I’m gonna show you what the best in the world at each individual metric are doing to improve it and do so well right now. Now we report these separately because we can learn from the gyms that post the best numbers in each category. We share their scores publicly so that you have something to aim for, not so that you can compare your results against theirs. Here are our leaders worldwide for appointments set, appointments showed and appointments closed in May 2023. As soon as I walk you through these leaderboards, I’ll tell you what to and do to improve at each stage.

Chris Cooper (02:36):
OK, so let’s talk about people who are booking the most appointments on their website. We’re not gonna track leads because that’s almost irrelevant. If you get a thousand leads hitting your website and nobody’s booking an appointment, who cares how many more leads you can get? That’s why, you know, as a sidebar here, the marketing agencies who promise you 30 new leads or whatever, that’s just not relevant because if you’re not getting them to book appointments, if they’re not showing up for their appointments, if you’re not selling them at their appointments, you could get a million leads and it won’t matter. So let’s start with not how many leads people are getting but how many appointments they’re booking. That’s the first real step to tell you whether your marketing’s working. We’re gonna go through the top 10 in reverse order. Number 10 from Canada. Woo-hoo.

Chris Cooper (03:22):
They had 33 appointments booked last month. That means they had more than one appointment booked every single day for a new client. Pretty awesome. Up from there is 34. The owner of this gym, they’re in the States. They actually have two gyms, but this is just at one of their gyms. They had 34 appointments booked in May. Up from there, also in the U.S., 36 appointments booked. In seventh place, 36 appointments booked. In sixth place, 37 appointments booked. In fifth, a women’s-only gym, 37 appointments booked, also in the States. And now here’s where some of the leaders really start to pull away. Fourth place is a strength-training gym—they had 47 appointments booked. Third place is an F45. They had 60 appointments booked in May. Second place is actually a kickboxing franchise. And they had a hundred appointments booked in May.

Chris Cooper (04:14):
So it’s a hundred appointments, consultations booked. And in first place, this is absolutely bananas. This leader, they’re from Croatia. They had 214 appointments booked in May. Imagine having seven appointments booked every single day through the month of May, right? Maybe you don’t even want that many, but this is what the Number 1 gym in the world is doing for appointments booked, and we can learn from them, right? So whether you just want to get more generally fit and you don’t wanna be a powerlifter, you can still learn from the best deadlifter in the world about how to get better at deadlifting and improve your overall fitness. Even if you don’t want 214 NSIs in a single month or you don’t have that kind of capacity, you can still learn from them. By all means, do what the best are doing and then dial it back instead of just saying like, “I don’t wanna do whatever that is.”

Chris Cooper (05:06):
OK, so that’s NSI is booked. Congratulations to the top gyms—between one appointment booked and seven appointments booked a day. Incredible. Now let’s go to how many of those clients actually showed and look at the leaders worldwide for appointments showed. All right, so what’s really interesting here is that a lot of the places who are good at booking appointments are also great at getting clients to show up. And that’s really important because if you’re booking a thousand appointments a month and only 200 show up, then your show rate’s very, very low. You’re actually better to have a high percentage of the people who booked appointments actually show up because that tells you the leads you’re getting are good and they’re actually interested in your product. They’re not just clicking on random ads to see what you’re all about. So in 10th place, we had 24 people show. This is the same gym, and they’re in Canada. Congrats!

Chris Cooper (06:02):

In ninth place, 26 appointments actually showed—really amazing. You’re basically doing a sales appointment every single day. In eighth place—tied. We had two gyms with 29 appointments showed last month. In sixth place, fifth place, 33. And again, like that’s a sports-specific performance training gym. Very cool. In fourth, we had a strength-training gym have 40 appointments show. In third, we had an F45 franchise with 41 appointments showed. In second, it was more of a health-care facility in Europe—they had 62 appointments show. And get this: This is bananas. We had a kickboxing studio in first place last month. They’re in the State. They had a hundred NSIs actually show up. Now, this isn’t like the free-tour, try-a-free-workout, free trial. That’s not what this is. This is sitting down for a No Sweat Intro, a sales appointment, and talking about membership.

Chris Cooper (07:04):
OK? If you’re just running a free trial on Saturday and 10 people show up for it, that’s not as good as getting one person to sit down at a desk with you and talk about their best prescription, their best course of action and how you can solve their problems. So this gym had a hundred people show up for those appointments. Congratulations to them. What a milestone. We can all learn so much, and I’m gonna share their top lessons in a moment. Now let’s turn to closes. In the past, some people have asked me, why don’t you show rates? And the reality is that if we share hard numbers, we can learn right from them. So sharing hard numbers means that I can talk about this person’s bench squat and deadlift. If I just share percentages and say like, well this person has a total of 2,000 pounds and 80 percent of that is their deadlift, it’s confusing to try and learn from the best, right? Different people are the best in different categories. And it’s interesting that while a lot of the same gyms are on all three leaderboards for set, show and close, they’re not in the same ranking. So they all still have work to do to improve. And I don’t want to bury that by sharing a rate or percentage. I wanna share the actual numbers. So here we go. First off, NSIs closed. We had a gym in the States do 21. They’re in tenth place. They had people show up, and 21 of them signed up for new memberships last month. That’s great, right? And of course it’s not like the exaggerated numbers that you might see on Facebook: “I’m gonna get you 50 new clients in a month.” But what you actually have to ask yourself is how many people could you get and keep in a month?

Chris Cooper (08:46):
For me, 21 is a big number. Like, I don’t know if I could bring 21 into my gym right now and keep all of them. That’s why these numbers are so impressive: These gyms are signing these people up and keeping them long term. In ninth place, 22 new members last month. In eighth place, 23—amazing. In seventh, 24. In sixth place, 26 new members last month. That’s a new person come in going through their NSI and starting an onboarding process before joining the group every single day that you were open last month. Incredible. In fifth place, 27 new members signed up last month. In fourth place, 28. In third place, 29. In second place, 34. And in first place, 46 new members last month. That’s absolutely incredible. And here’s another thing I want you to keep in mind. For most gyms, according to our data set of 16,000 microgyms worldwide, the average client coming in is gonna pay about $112 for their first month. In a Two-Brain gym, every client that’s coming in is going to pay double or triple that in their first month. Part of that is their onboarding process, or they might be introduced to personal training, but we customize the prescription for the client, and that usually means a higher-value service for the client and a much faster outcome for them getting to their goals, too. So what’s interesting here is that while you know, 10th place is 21 new clients, those 21 clients could be worth as much as 50 or 60 clients at the average gym. 21 is a lot. It’s more than I think I would want at my gym, but congratulations to these people. I also don’t want an 800-pound deadlift. So let’s get back to how they did it. Now, if you’re looking at our blog this week or you’re watching this on YouTube, there’s a cool graphic that’s gonna show you, depending on where the weaknesses are in your funnel, exactly what to do to fix them.

Chris Cooper (10:43):
But remember, if you’re not tracking these metrics and you’re not breaking down your funnel step by step, you’ll never know what’s going wrong, and you might attribute it to something that’s actually working. You might stop doing something that’s actually working because you don’t know that it’s working, right? So here we go. First off, if you need more leads into your funnel, there’s really only about three things that you can do. You can increase your ad spend, you can refresh your creative—so put out more in different media—or you can test an alternate offer. You know, maybe the pitch that you’re making just isn’t appealing to people. Now if you’re tracking your metrics, what you can do is you can be testing three or four different ads at a time. And this is what we actually teach in our course is once you learn how to do Facebook and Instagram ads, you test three at a time, and you run them for a month at very minimal cost, and then you figure out which one’s working best and you move all the money to that one so that you’re going bullets and then cannonballs basically.

Chris Cooper (11:40):
OK? Now next, if you’re getting leads but you need more appointments set, then you can improve your speed to contact. So you can pick up the phone and call them faster. The best rule of thumb is call ’em within 10 minutes if you can. I know this is awkward at first, but the reality is they’ve filled in information because they want to talk to you. And so the greatest service that you can do them as their future coach is just pick up the phone and call ’em. Get over your awkward feelings and just say, “Am I willing to do this hard thing in order to help this other human who needs me?” OK? So that’s the first thing that you can do. The next thing that you can do to get more appointments is improve the call to action on your website.

Chris Cooper (12:22):
Part of this means having a website that actually works. I know back in the day, we all created our own websites, and they were these masterful works of art, and they didn’t do anything. Really. If you’re using something like Kilo, these places will show you exactly how many leads you’re getting and how many of those leads are booking calls. It. The CRM helps with that, and I’ll come to lead nurture in a moment, but the reality is just knowing it gives you a superpower. It gives you a button to push, a lever to pull. You can take action if you know. It’s a diagnostic tool, OK? How to get more NSI booked? There’s a couple more things you can do. So I said you can improve your speed to contact and you can improve your call to action on your website.

Chris Cooper (13:06):
You can also just increase your outreach volume, right? You can run more ads, and you can get more people into your funnel. This is what most people default to. And I know we kinda poo-pooed it because we say “fix your funnel first before you pour more water into it,” but the reality is even if you’ve got a broken funnel, if you pour water into it faster, like more leads are gonna come out the other end, right? And, finally, the last thing is call leads more often. So one thing that you can do is you pick up the phone, somebody fills out a form on your site, you call ’em within 10 minutes, they don’t answer. You think, “Oh, they don’t want to hear from me.” Call ’em again. Try ’em. Like these are human beings whose lives you can dramatically impact. They’re worth the extra effort.

Chris Cooper (13:47):
They are very uncomfortable filling out this form. They’re going to be uncomfortable walking into your gym. They’re gonna be uncomfortable working out in front of strangers. You can shoulder some of that discomfort. You can get a little bit uncomfortable and do the thing that makes you uncomfortable, which is picking up the phone and calling them or calling them twice or three times. You know, sometimes you have to call people five or six times before you catch ’em at the right time or before it’s convenient or before they’re comfortable answering. And they’re not gonna call you a jerk. What they’re going to say is “here’s why I talked to you in the first place.” Right? And it’s not like you’re chasing them. What you’re doing is you are taking the first few steps toward them so that then they can take the steps toward you.

Chris Cooper (14:28):
Alright? If you need to improve your show rate—so these are the people who booked appointments, but they’re not showing up. There are a few things that you can do. First, you can send personal messages through video or text. If you’re in gymownersunited.com and you’re getting our free resources and you know, maybe you asked me a question through Facebook Messenger, I might respond with a voice message, you know, because sometimes I can talk faster than I can type, but sometimes I want to tell you a story, or sometimes I want to tell you how your struggles relate to mine. And I’ll tell you. What that does is it builds trust between me and you. And if you send me a voice message back, then I get more context, too, and I get to hear how you’re feeling, and I get more cues about whether you’re frustrated or scared or whatever, right?

Chris Cooper (15:17):
So upgrading like your communication method really helps people to know, like, and trust you faster. So personal messages through video or text are amazing. I don’t use video very often. It’s just really easy to send a voice message. You can also build rapport through email or text. So when somebody books an NSI, you can’t just go dark and wait for ’em to show up. They wanna know that they’ve done it right? They want a confirmation that they have an appointment. They want reminders. People expect this stuff now, right? If they book an appointment and they never hear from you, they’re gonna question whether you got the a booking or whether they did it right? You know? So they need to hear from you. Start that communication thread. Remember, it’s a conversation, not a monologue. Ask them questions. Next, you can also create some scarcity or urgency before your appointment.

Chris Cooper (16:06):
So one thing that you can do is you can say, “Hey, Jimmy, I’ve got three appointment slots today. I’m really fired up that they’re all booked. I wanna make sure that you’re gonna show up, though, because there’s a list of five people who really want that slot. OK?” It’s up to you whether you feel comfortable with this. I don’t—unless I really do have a long waiting list. And you could say, “Hey, Jimmy, dropping you a line man. So fired up to see you at 1 o’clock. If something has come up and you need to cancel, please let me know right now because other people would really love to get in that spot, OK?” It’s not just a psychological challenge for them. It’s showing them like your time is important and that they need to take it seriously and that they are important enough to warrant your full attention.

Chris Cooper (16:49):
The last thing that you can do to improve your show rate is one of those “oh, man, I should have thought of that” moments that I have all the time. And that is get them the appointment as fast as possible. Look, if, if they’re scrolling through your page and they’re like, “OK, that’s it. Now’s the time I’ve gotta book this thing,” and then they wait two weeks to talk to you, or even a week, their passion’s gonna cool off, right? They’re gonna forget the mental state they were in when they booked that appointment, and they won’t think of it again until they’re back in that mental state, and then they’re starting from scratch and they’ve wasted a month. And they could have been so much more fit if you got them into an appointment quickly. So you need to have appointment availability almost all the time.

Chris Cooper (17:29):
If you can only get people into an appointment at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday, that’s not gonna be convenient for everybody. And so as you level up as an owner and you buy yourself time, part of the time should be creating availability to have these consultations with people and get them in there as quickly as you can. Now, if you need to improve your close rate, there are some things that you can do that will help. The Number 1 thing, though, is to practice, practice, practice. Get reps. At Two-Brain, we do reps with mentors one on one. We give you this thing called a “scenario deck” that lets you role-play with your staff. We have Office Hours where you can come in and role-play every single week if you want to. You can grab other people in the group and just role-play.

Chris Cooper (18:11):
But the reality is you will not be comfortable with sales because you’re bringing all this baggage to the conversation. Number 1, you’re bringing the baggage that you were taught by people who don’t have money, right? Your teachers, maybe your parents, about how salespeople are evil or they’re tricky or they’re trying to fool people. You’re bringing that baggage in. Second, you’re bringing in the baggage of projection. There’s so much on the line here. “What happens if they don’t sign up? Oh my god, I’m not gonna eat this week.” So you need to get reps to get over those things and just get comfortable with it. There’s a couple of other things you can do to improve your close rate. First, prequalify your leads. Now, if you have less than 150 clients in your gym, don’t worry about this step. Get people in. Even if your close rate is low, there’s value in getting reps and just having these conversations, OK?

Chris Cooper (19:01):
But if you’re at 150 clients, you know you’re making over $80,000 a year take home, you might wanna prequalify your leads. There’s some simple ways to do this. Number 1, put your prices on your website. If price is gonna be a big objection and you’ve got enough clients, let’s get that outta the way first, OK? Next you can call ’em up and say, “Hey, making sure that I’ve got the solution for you so that we don’t waste each other’s time here. What goals are you looking for?” And you have a conversation. You get a sense of their budget, whether they’re a good fit or not before you actually sit down to the NSI. Again, if you have less than 150 clients or you’re not making what you wanna make per year, skip this step. Don’t pre-qualify. Just get them in.

Chris Cooper (19:43):
Another way that will help your close rate is to build rapport in advance. If you’ve got a solid bank of media out there—even if it’s social media, like Instagram—they will feel like they know you before they enter your office. If you don’t have a good social-media presence, if you don’t publish a blog or a podcast and they know nothing about you, then they are making a deal with a stranger. It is so much easier to make a deal with somebody when you feel like you know them, you like them and you trust them. They will be excited. So build rapport by constantly publishing. Third, clarify their problem. Follow the Prescriptive Model. Their problem is not “I don’t have a CrossFit gym to belong to.” Their problem is “I wanna feel better. I wanna have more energy. I might wanna lose some weight. I might wanna make my arms bigger. I might wanna feel stronger. I don’t wanna feel tight anymore. I don’t wanna feel sick all the time.” Whatever that problem is, you need to help them clarify that and then sell them the solution. Simply selling your spin class, your kickboxing class, your workout—that is not solving their problem. And you’re gonna have a much lower conversion rate because now you gotta convince them to just try your thing and see if it works. OK? The next step to improve your close rate is clearly tell them how you will help. So don’t just say, “You can come to class three times a week.” You can say, “Doing constantly varied functional movement at high intensity will help boost up your metabolism. And so you’ll see a little bit of weight gain slowly, but those results will compound over time and you’ll start losing weight faster and faster.”

Chris Cooper (21:15):
That’s how you tell ’em how your service will solve their problem. You don’t do it by pulling out your spreadsheets. You don’t do it by drawing graphs on the floor. These are all mistakes that I’ve made. You don’t need to barf on ’em for an hour. You just need to clearly define their problem and then tell them how your service will help. And if it won’t help, you need to tell ’em that, too. Finally, create conviction and ask them to sign up. Creating conviction is easy. It’s basically, “Does this make sense to you? Make sense? Sound good?” And as soon as they say yes to something, then you’ve got some conviction, and it’s time to say, “Are you ready to get started?” That’s it. Not, “How would you like to pay for this?” Not, “Will you sign a one year contract?” Nothing that makes you uncomfortable. Just say, “Are you ready to get started?”

Chris Cooper (21:58):

And their answer to that is gonna be a yes or a no. If it’s a yes, say, “Great. Here’s how to pay.” If it’s a no, then say, “OK, what do I have to do to remove the obstacles that are stopping you from getting started right now?” You’re coaching, right? You are solving their problems for them. You are good at this. All you have to do is get rid of your own baggage. So that’s how you improve your appointments set, showed and closed. And, of course, you know, nobody needs to do all of these things all the time all at once. Nobody needs to do them right now. But what you do need to do is figure out where the weakest links are in your funnel by looking at metrics and then strive to improve them. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you want to talk about this episode or any episode, you can go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free Facebook group, where we answer questions. We share these leaderboards. We share top tips publicly for free for over 7,000 gym owners around the world. Thank you for your service. Thank you for changing lives!

The post Gym Marketing Metrics: How to Measure and Improve Them appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Marketing Math: Our May Leaders for Set, Show and Close Rates

Is your marketing actually working?

If you’re not measuring these metrics, it’s impossible to know.

Leads: the people who land on your website. They could be coming from your organic media, your social media or your paid ads.

Set rate: the number of people who visit your site and set an appointment. These are people who are interested enough to sit down and hear your pitch.

Show rate: the number of people who book an appointment and actually show up. Sadly, this is rarely 100 percent. The people who show are serious about signing up.

Close rate: the number of people who buy.

None of these will be a perfect 100 percent at any time. However, if you know these numbers, you can diagnose the problems in your marketing. For example:

Below you’ll find some ways to improve each part of your marketing funnel.

If you need more leads in your funnel, you can:

Increase your ad spend.Refresh your creative.Test an alternate offer.

If you need more appointments (set rate), you can:

Improve your speed to contact.Improve your call to action on your website.Increase your outreach volume.Call leads faster.

If you need to improve your show rate, you can:

Send personal messages through video or text.Build rapport through email or text.Create some scarcity or urgency before your appointment.Set up an automated reminder sequence.Get them into the appointment as fast as possible.

If you need to improve your close rate, you can:

Pre-frame their problem before the appointment.Prequalify your leads.Build rapport.Clarify their problem.Clearly tell them how you’ll help.Create conviction and ask them to sign up.

Of course, not everyone needs to do all of these things at once. A mentor can help you choose your top priority and improve it.

What should your numbers be? Here are the top Two-Brain gyms for set rate, show rate and close rate in May:

We report each separately because we can learn from the gyms that post the best numbers in each category. We share the scores publicly so that you have something to aim for.

Their best advice appears on our podcast and on YouTube today:

The post Marketing Math: Our May Leaders for Set, Show and Close Rates appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

In His Own Words: Gym Owner Vel Bates on a Year of Mentorship

I put Two-Brain to the test at our annual summit.

On June 3 and 4, I asked a host of gym owners if they were getting a return on their significant investments in mentorship.

Without exception, the fitness entrepreneurs I spoke to reported that they are indeed seeing ROI.

I’m always excited to talk to gym owners about their experiences with Two-Brain. I love hearing the stories of success: more time spent with family, less stress, more income, increased happiness, perfect days and so on. And I heard a lot of those over the weekend.

But I was really looking forward to chatting with Vel Bates.

Vel runs 3D Fitness in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with Lexc Ackerson. I met Vel in 2022 at the summit. Bates was there to check Two-Brain out and see if it was legit. He wasn’t sold on the idea of mentorship and wanted to do some research—a wise move.

We talked a little about his business at an afterparty, and it was obvious that he was a great trainer and passionate entrepreneur. He showed me a sizable personal Instagram account as well as impressive results he had achieved with clients at 3D.

Like so many fitness entrepreneurs, Vel was working too much and wasn’t sure how to grow his business. He also chatted with Chris Cooper and several other Two-Brain team members, who gave him some ideas to consider.

I was thrilled to hear that Vel signed up with Two-Brain about three weeks after the 2022 gathering, and we stayed in touch through Two-Brain’s private Facebook group over the next 11 months.

But I really wanted to talk to Bates in person in 2023 to find out exactly what happened after he made the decision to work with a mentor.

A year later, was his life actually better? Was he working fewer hours? Did he overcome his skepticism? Was he seeing a return on his investment?

I won’t answer those questions. I’ll let Vel and Lexc handle them:

If you’re interested in transforming your business over the next year, book a call to talk about mentorship today. It’s totally fine if you’re skeptical: Bring all your questions—especially questions about ROI.

I’ll just give you this number: 93 percent of clients who enroll in our RampUp Program add enough revenue to pay for it in just 12 weeks.

The post In His Own Words: Gym Owner Vel Bates on a Year of Mentorship appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Two Paths to Wealth and Security for Gym Owners

My new book, “Millionaire Gym Owner,” will show you the path to wealth.

Not a theoretical path but the actual routes taken by over 30 gym owners in our Tinker program—gym owners who are real millionaires.

The book is really a catalogue of their journeys, with step-by-step breakdowns of every move they made. I share my journey, of course—but I wrote the book to give you proven paths to wealth. And there are several.

If this isn’t appealing to you, I invite you to read the previous two blog posts about wealth:

In the first, I wrote about why I want to make gym owners wealthy (it’s not for the Lambo shots on Instagram).In the second, I wrote that $1 million in savings won’t be enough for you to retire.

Here, I’ll share two paths to wealth: buying assets and reinvesting. We teach people how to walk both paths—and others, if they choose—in our Tinker program for gym owners.

Real Estate

The first retirement strategy I learned comes from “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki.

In short: Buy a building once and rent it out forever.

This is not the “buy, fix and flip” strategy that makes for good TV. This is the “buy and hold” strategy that makes for wealth.

I started with buying a building for my gym. My mortgage payment was $3,600 a month (about what I was already paying in rent). After the purchase, my money went to the bank instead of a landlord. And when the mortgage was paid off, the money started flowing straight to me—and it will do so forever.

My plan was to pay off the mortgage quickly, bank the mortgage payments and then rent the building to someone else when it was time to retire. I figured that would earn me $3,600 a month (or $43,200 per year) for life. It’s not quite enough to retire, but it’s pretty good.

This is what Kiyosaki calls a “cash-flow asset”: You buy it once and it pays you forever.

This was before the days of Airbnb and Vrbo. Multifamily purchasing groups weren’t popular yet. But the strategy still works: I collect well over $100,000 per year in net rental income from my commercial properties now. I could retire solely on that if I wanted to.

Reinvesting

The next strategy is reinvesting your profit.

I personally love a “barbell strategy” for investments, and not just because of the name. This comes from Nassim Taleb, who recommends having a lot of really conservative investments, one or two higher-risk investments and nothing in between. Like a barbell, you’re heavily weighted on both ends instead of spreading your investments across 10 different things.

As a gym owner, my business is my high-risk investment. It’s my passion project. Luckily, it pays me a great yield—far more than I’d make in the market. But that doesn’t mean I should own five different types of businesses. Instead, I should maximize that business, take the profits out and put them in conservative investments that won’t take my attention away from my core business.

The last thing I need is something else that will wake me up at 4 a.m., have me obsessing over it and send me running around all day.

If I opened a coffee shop, for example, I’d scratch an entrepreneurial itch, but the coffee shop would probably fail, and it would hurt my gym. So I own a gym, make money and spend lots of time in other people’s coffee shops.

Where do I put the money? Into conservative investments.

The exact investments change over time, but as I’m writing this I’m looking for bonds or other high-security spots where time is on my side. I can play the long game with those because my short game is to be all-in on my gym.

Many Paths, One Goal

Of course, there are other ways to build wealth. The key is to grow your gym so it’s providing a good income now, as well as a little bit extra that you can invest into your future. In my book, you’ll read about few dozen ways people have done it.

The victory for me isn’t convincing you that one way is best; the victory is that over 30 gym owners in Two-Brain have found ways to build wealth and are willing to share their paths with you.

Fifteen years ago, there were no models of success in fitness. Now we certify two millionaires every month at Two-Brain. I can’t think of a more successful outcome.

That’s why I’m so excited to share this book with you: to give you the inspiration I wanted as a new gym owner!

The post Two Paths to Wealth and Security for Gym Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Entrepreneurs: Why $1 Million Isn’t Enough to Retire

My lowest point as a gym owner didn’t come when I couldn’t pay the rent.

It actually came a few months later: I had a full book for personal training, I was covering my costs (barely), and I was taking home about $40,000 per year.

Things were “OK.” But then I started thinking about my future.

I had a baby, but she didn’t need much … yet. Eventually, she’d need school clothes. And more food. And someday she might want to go to college. And maybe she’d have a little brother or sister. And someday my old truck would run its last trip to the gym.

How would I ever pay for any of that?

Hell, how would I ever stop working 14-hour days and take a one-week vacation?

How would I ever retire from this?

I thought, “I bet someone else has already figured this out.”

So I started looking for examples of people who had worked as a trainer for 30 years, socked away enough to retire, bought a little place and learned to like golf—people who didn’t worry about money anymore.

Uh, oh: There were none.

I had to make my own plan, and that started with calculating how much I’d actually need to retire.

Tip: $1 million isn’t enough.

The 4 Percent Rule

This is a quick-and-dirty way to calculate how much you’ll need to retire:

Divide your annual retirement income goal by 4 percent. (Read more on Investopedia here.)

For an annual income of $80,000, you’ll need $2,000,000 in savings earning a 5 percent return. (That’s your $80,000 income goal divided by 0.04).

However, $2 million is still not enough. $80,000 today is a decent income, but 50 years from now, when you and I are cresting 90 and still going strong, that $80,000 won’t go far. Right now, inflation is higher than normal, and nobody’s getting 5 percent returns on stocks or Bitcoin or most investments.

You’re going to need more: To retire, you’re going to need real wealth.

In the next post in this series, I’ll share two strategies from my upcoming book, “Millionaire Gym Owner,” so you can skip the years of study and jump straight to building wealth right away.

The post Entrepreneurs: Why $1 Million Isn’t Enough to Retire appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Millionaire Gym Owner: Why Should Fitness Entrepreneurs Be Wealthy?

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Should gym owners be millionaires—and why? I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today I’m gonna talk about a new book that I’m gonna have out in around the fourth quarter of 2023. It’s called “Millionaire Gym Owner.” And when I was writing it, going through some of the process, my editor, Robert, sent me a list of questions and I said, “Man, these would be awesome questions to just answer in advance.” And so I’m gonna ask the questions and share the answers with you today because I think this is really important framing for gym owners. But if you wanna talk about this more, just head to gymownersunited.com. Ask questions about the episode there. Tell me your opinion: Should gym owners be millionaires? So here we go with Robert’s questions. His first question is “how realistic is this? Can a gym owner actually become a millionaire?”

Chris Cooper (00:45):
And the answer is “yes.” Now, when I was starting out years ago, I was looking for examples of people who had actually done well in fitness. They had made enough money that at age 55 or 60, they could actually just retire and buy a little condo in Florida and just be done—the way my parents who are teachers are done. And probably the way that your parents are done. They worked a career, but then at a certain point they had enough money to not work anymore. And when I looked around the industry, I couldn’t find anybody like that. And so I started asking myself “where can I find answers on how to retire from this, let alone have enough money to pay for my kids to go to college and for my wife and I to buy, you know, a little cottage somewhere, or an RV or whatever we want, and just kind of survive without working 80 hours a week for the rest of my life?”

Chris Cooper (01:36):
And so I had to look outside fitness to find models, but I eventually did. And now we teach those models inside Two-Brain, and we have 28 certified millionaires. Now, this is all because we looked at how it could be done, and then I did it, and then I started teaching it to our mentors, who taught it to their clients. And now the clients are actually becoming millionaires. This doesn’t mean that they’re these greedy Mr. Peanut characters. It just means that they can afford to have this career lasting 30 years in fitness. They don’t have to quit and go get a job selling real estate somewhere because there is a happy ending waiting for them. They can make this an actual career. And until the point where we said “you can make enough money to actually retire,” I don’t think that was possible.

Chris Cooper (02:22):
And so the turn that we were seeing in the fitness industry was really all because of that. There was no way to actually stay in it long enough to retire. A million bucks isn’t enough to retire. Let’s face it, by the time you and I retire, it’s gonna take $4 or $5 million. But once you know how to make that first million, those things just compound, and the lessons repeat themselves. And you can make yourself wealthy enough to provide for your family, to retire, to sail off into the sunset and create a meaningful lasting legacy in your community. His next question was “why should I think about being a millionaire gym owner? If I’m a gym owner, why should I be thinking about that—especially if I’m worried about how to pay the rent?” And the reality is that you have to have an eye on the goal because that will help you make decisions in the present.

Chris Cooper (03:08):
Okay, so I know retirement’s a long way off. I know you love your job, right? Every single day, every single moment, absolutely. But eventually you’re gonna be tired, and you’re gonna wanna break. And so you need to be thinking about this right now. I know for some people it’s a boring subject to think about saving for retirement, but the reality is the way that you get to retirement is different from the way that our parents did. You are not going to be handed a gold watch at age 60 and say “bon voyage.” You are not going to win the lottery. You are gonna have to create that path on your own as an entrepreneur. And that’s what makes it exciting and interesting: There are multiple ways to do it, but you have to start now. And so a lot of that means you have to be either reinvesting or building your business big enough that you can sell it or something else.

Chris Cooper (03:54):
So if you take the reinvestment path—and, by the way, that’s what the book is about, like the different paths to get there step by step–if you take the investment path, that means that your business has to be profitable enough now to pay you a little bit more than what you need to live a happy life, so you’ve got some money to reinvest, and you’ve got some time to learn about reinvestments. And then from there where you go—like Airbnbs or the stock market or a crypto or whatever—that’s up to you. And we’ll map that out in the book, too. But that’s how thinking about the future forces you to make decisions in the present. If you’re not thinking about the future and “hey, how am I gonna retire someday?” it can be very easy to defer decisions and actions in the present.

Chris Cooper (04:35):
If you don’t need to be profitable in your gym right now because you’re not thinking about retirement later, it’s easy to defer that rate increase, or it’s easy to hold off on firing that bad staff person that’s costing you business. It’s easy to put off mentorship, or it’s easy to just say “we’re doing okay” when you’re just barely breaking even. Because I’ll tell you something: What planning for retirement reminds you of most is that time is not on your side. Time is not a resource that you can buy. It’s not something that you can get back later if you run out now. You have to be investing your time more than anything else, especially at this stage before you have money to invest. You have to invest your time wisely. And thinking about making a million dollars or retirement forces you to think about how you’re investing your time and forces you to use it better.

Chris Cooper (05:28):
Robert’s third question was “what does becoming a millionaire gym owner really mean?” A lot of us who are not strong in financial education, and this was certainly me, would think being a millionaire means that you make a million dollars every year, but that’s not actually the case. Being a millionaire means that you have a million dollars in net worth that is paying you something every year. So let’s take the easiest example. Let’s say that you have a million dollars sitting in a bond somewhere. OK, it’s locked up, you can’t touch it, but it’s never gonna go away, and it pays you 5 percent interest every year. Well, that’s $50,000 recurring forever. Another way to think about it is real estate. And this was the first path that I took because it’s the first one that I learned. And so I bought the building that my gym was in, and I knew that any tenant in that building, whether it was my gym or somebody else, would pay $3,500 to $4,000 per month forever.

Chris Cooper (06:21):
And once that building was paid off and the mortgage was gone, I would still be collecting that money forever, so I could stop working and still just collect rent on my building from another tenant even. And that would be income for the rest of my life. A great book on this is “Rich Dad, poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. So that’s what becoming a millionaire gym owner actually means: having enough assets and investments that pay you without you showing up for work every day and coaching the 6 o’clock class and billing the clients, okay? That’s what investment means. Now, there are other ways to do this. Of course, you could just build up your fitness empire to be one really huge gym or like multiple smaller microgyms, and then you could sell it all at once and make a million bucks all at once and then retire from that.

Chris Cooper (07:08):
That’s fine. That’s mapped out in the book, too. For most people though, it looks like having a business that they’re proud to own, that they love because they’re not burned out, that pays them a little bit more than they need. And they can reinvest that somewhere else into passive income streams that will build for them and compound until they’re ready to retire and then pay for their lifestyle. That’s what being a millionaire gym owner really needs. For me, I’m gonna take this a step further. What motivates me is giving away money. It’s not making money. And so my motto is “make lots of money and give it away.” And so for me, my goal is to give away a million dollars every year for the rest of my life and not impoverish myself. So what I need to do is have $20 million in assets that pay me an average of about 5 percent each per year.

Chris Cooper (07:57):
That could be real estate, that could be bonds, it could be stocks, it could be anything that gives me about a 5 percent return, any investment. If I’ve got $20 million in assets, and they’re paying me $5 million a year–sorry, if they’re paying me 5 percent—that’s a million dollars a year in income that’s coming to me possibly that I can just give away. And so that’s what I’m building toward right now is $20 million in assets so that I can give away a million dollars every year. You can do it however you want to. I wanna make sure that you’ve got enough assets that you can retire and have the lifestyle that you want and just work as much as you want to—or as little. Robert’s fourth question was “how would my life change how much or how little if I just became a millionaire?”

Chris Cooper (08:37):
And here’s the reality. When people are going through Two-Brain, we’re tracking their metrics all the time, and then when they enter the Tinker Phase of mentorship, we track their net worth. So up to that point, we’re tracking how much they’re making, like income, and then after that we’re tracking their net worth. And a lot of them, they get to that millionaire mark, and they do the net-worth calculator, and they’re like, “Oh, I actually passed it. I’m already a millionaire.” Like, they don’t even realize it until they’ve passed it. And that’s because they’ve been smart, they’ve been making an income, they’ve been making investments, but they’re not looking at their bank account all the time. So we send them a big award because when I became a millionaire, there was nobody waiting outside my door with a top hat in a monocle saying, “Hey, Chris, welcome to this super-exclusive club. You know, now you’re a millionaire. Whoa, let’s go play ‘Monopoly’ on the beach or something.” Nobody celebrated it. And let’s face it: It is a really amazing outcome. It’s a mark of entrepreneurial success. You took the risk, and it worked, and you did it, and you’re smart enough and hardworking enough that it paid off. So we send people these massive plaques saying “certified millionaire,” because, Number 1, we check the math. We make sure that they actually are a real millionaire. I know there’s people that you see on your Facebook feed who are saying, “Oh yeah, I made $80,000 this month. If that continues for the next 12 months, I’m gonna be a millionaire.” It’s not the case, right? Like Number 1, forecasts are BS. They don’t count. But Number 2, that’s like business revenue.

Chris Cooper (10:10):
That’s not personal income. They’re not a millionaire. We wanna actually calculate net worth. But when it occurs, a lot of the time people don’t even realize it because their lifestyle hasn’t changed that much. For me, when I finally calculated what my net worth was, it was probably around two and a half million. And I know that I breathed the sigh of relief. I kind of felt like no matter what happens here, that’s enough money to give a little bit of income to my family forever, right? Like, not enough to pay for my kids’ education, not enough to like retire at age 40 and just live on the beach. But if I’m smart, like it’s enough that we’re safe, right? It’s a safety net. And so I felt good about it. I felt more confident because I could walk around and say like, “I’m a millionaire.”

Chris Cooper (10:57):
You know, people might introduce me as one. I don’t know. But the reality is it didn’t change my mission. It didn’t change the way that I carried myself. I still got up for work at 4 a.m. the next day and wrote a blog post to help gym owners. So for most people in this day and age, being a millionaire is not a dramatic life change. There is another time when it is. So let’s say somebody wins the lottery. They perceive that they’ve had this massive life change, but the reality is that money was like a thunderbolt into their life, and it’s often pretty destructive. If you get it without working for it, it can dramatically alter your life because you don’t know how to handle it. You have no financial education or experience. And so people who win the lottery generally are broke again within 2.5 years because they just don’t know what to do with it.

Chris Cooper (11:44):
Entrepreneurs who build up slowly to becoming a millionaire, they don’t see a massive change because their lifestyle has been changing so slowly up to that point that there’s not a big flip of the switch. The biggest actual change for me when I realized that my net worth was more than enough to provide for me for the rest of my life was that I felt like, “OK, now I can be more generous.” Up to that point, I think, I wouldn’t say that I had a “scarcity mindset,” but I would definitely think about every donation that I made. “Should I put a 20 in the collection plate or a 10? Should I give that person $50 or five? Should I tip 10 percent or 15?” Now I don’t even think about it, and it is the best feeling ever. And so the reason that we wanna make gym owners millionaires is because these are some of the most giving people on the planet.

Chris Cooper (12:31):
They’re willing to give up their lives in the service of others. And these are the people who should be millionaires, right? These are the people who are going to do the right things for all the right reasons for all the right people. And that’s why I wanna make gym owners millionaires. Robert’s next question was “why do some gym owners become millionaires and others don’t?” And it’s because most entrepreneurs—this is not just gym owners—most entrepreneurs buy themselves a job. They aren’t actual business owners. They become self-employed. And there’s a few reasons for this. Number 1, at first they’re happy just doing what they love. And so they don’t set themselves up for success out of the gate. Number 2, they probably don’t have a lot of financial experience or education. Most gym owners are first-time entrepreneurs. And so nobody’s told them “you have to charge enough that you can make a margin.”

Chris Cooper (13:18):
They feel greedy. And so they just charge the minimum amount that they can, or they charge what they could themselves afford, not what their clients could afford. And that’s gonna be a low number because they’re a broke gym owner. So that’s part of it. Part of it is that they just can’t replace themselves in their business. They don’t systemize anything. You know, a great book about this is “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber, and it talks about buying yourself a job and becoming self-employed and everything’s great for a year or two, and then, “Oh geez—I hurt my leg or I need to take a vacation and I can’t.” Or like, “Oh, man, you know, my wife’s having a baby. We need money and we need to take time off.” And so we just don’t think of these things in advance.

Chris Cooper (14:00):
There are also some of us who are passionate about our fitness method, like CrossFit, right? And so we confuse what we’re doing with being altruistic. We’re ready to murder ourselves to coach CrossFit. So we almost feel bad about making money. That’s not how it should be. The things that will make you a million dollars are mostly the same things that will make you a sustainable gym that will last for 30 years, create meaningful employment for other coaches, and get your clients better health and longevity outcomes. There are a lot of the same things. In fact, if you just did the things that will fix your gym, made it profitable and made it run itself, and then extended the time horizon far enough, you would become a millionaire, right? That’s where it starts. And so the reasons that some gym owners become millionaires but most don’t is because they don’t systemize their staff. They don’t systemize their prices. They don’t change their prices. They don’t have a clear idea of who their best clients are. They don’t have a retention plan for those clients. They’re not being prescriptive with them, so their churn rate is too high. They don’t charge enough. So they’re just trying to get more bodies in the door, and eventually they get burned out. They just don’t know how to run a business. And that’s what our, our Two-Brain programs are for. So this might be my favorite question from Robert: “Doesn’t becoming a millionaire create a whole new set of problems?” It didn’t for me. But again, if you win the lottery, yes, it will. You are going to have people coming outta the woodwork asking you for money. You are not going to understand where to put your money and and how to have it compound because you were never forced to learn those lessons.

Chris Cooper (15:33):
And so you’ll go out and you’ll buy your Ferrari, and you’ll lose 40 percent to taxes, and you’ll forget about that—and all these things, right? And so suddenly you have to become financially literate when you don’t feel like it and everything’s on the line. You might even quit your job. Instead, if you earn the million, you learn financial literacy in advance. And that’s one way that you get to the million. You learn discipline and habits that will create wealth instead of just spending money, right? And like, that’s how you get to the million. And so the way that you get there really, really matters because it serves as a forcing function to create the habits that will help you be successful when you are a millionaire versus just winning the lottery, right? I’ve had some family members do that, and trust me, three years, they’re broke again with no lessons learned.

Chris Cooper (16:24):
So I even know somebody who’s won the lottery twice, and they burned through it both times within three years, and they were absolutely broke. Again, without learning any lessons from it, they’re still buying lottery tickets. So the way that you get there really matters, right? The problems that are created are not created by wealth. The problems are the things that you learn on your way to becoming wealthy, like financial literacy, like paying yourself first, like compounding interest and thinking like an investor. And so it doesn’t necessarily create a whole new set of problems on the way there. You’re gonna enter new tax brackets, and you’re gonna learn new things about not overpaying taxes. And you’re gonna learn how to move money around, and you’re gonna learn how to put money aside for your kids, and you’re gonna make decisions about how much money should you give your kids?

Chris Cooper (17:11):
But I’d rather make those decisions because you’re wealthy than make those decisions because you’re broke, okay? Nobody cares about money until they don’t have any money. Then it’s all they care about. I want you to make those decisions from a position of strength. And that’s why I like people building up to the million dollars and avoiding those problems by working through them in advance. All right? And this is now my least-favorite question, but it is the most common one, and that is “don’t I have to become a different person to become a millionaire?” You don’t have to become greedy or a bad boss or a bad friend to become that. And the reason that most people think this is because of the imagery that we see all the time in popular media, right? Like, you watch a Disney movie and most of the bad guys are wealthy and all of the wealthy people are bad.

Chris Cooper (17:59):
You come up through an industrial education system, which is heavily unionized and geared toward getting a job that you will keep for 40 years by passing these tests and meeting the standard every time and never varying. Like none of this points toward entrepreneurship. Financial literacy is dramatically lacking. And so what happens is that the wealthy actually get demonized or villainized in our economy, right? Like when you think about a wealthy person, if you’re just drawing ’em out on a piece of paper, what would they look like? Probably kind of crooked, right? Like we tend to believe that people who are wealthy must have taken their wealth from somebody else. We have this scarcity mindset because that’s how we’re brought up. That’s how we’re taught. I have a new blog called “Business Is Good” that’s built to change that mindset, that perception.

Chris Cooper (18:50):
I want people to understand that being wealthy doesn’t mean victimizing somebody else or terrorizing that person, or I don’t have to take from you to get. In fact, the way that we grow is we all grow together. And that’s how you grow fastest, and that’s how you grow best. The people who are most likely to get this lesson are entrepreneurs. And the best entrepreneurs that I know are mostly gym owners. These are generous people who do not want to take anything that they haven’t earned, who want to grow their personal wealth by increasing the value that they provide to their clients and community and the world. And so they understand these lessons. If anybody’s gonna be wealthy in this economy, it should be gym owners, the people who are saving people from early death, from sadness, from disease, from preventable medical conditions that are costing the taxpayers.

Chris Cooper (19:41):
These are the people who are generating taxes by running small businesses and employing other people. These are the people who can change our economy and change health outcomes for their community and the world. If anybody should be rich and wealthy, it’s gym owners—trust me. But most of them grew up in an environment where they were suspicious of money, where they didn’t trust anybody with money, where they had a scarcity mindset, where they didn’t understand what wealth actually meant. And so I’m writing this book for two reasons. Number 1, to help gym owners actually become millionaires and stay in the game long enough to change lots of lives. But, Number 2, so that they actually understand why it’s important for them to be successful long term. Build a business that you’re proud to own. That means a business that makes money. It makes you a little bit more than what you need so that you can provide for your family in the future.

Chris Cooper (20:30):
It makes a little bit more than that. So that long term you can give back to other people in your community and create a legacy. And if it’s really successful, then you can make lots of money and give it away. That’s why I wanna be a millionaire, and that’s why I want gym owners to be a millionaires, too. Hope this helps. My name’s Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. If this was useful to you, this podcast is called “Run a Profitable Gym,” and you can join the conversation gymownersunited.com. I give away free stuff in there all the time to help gym owners be successful and grow on their path to becoming millionaires. The new book is “Millionaire Gym Owner,” and it will be out in fourth quarter of 2023. Hope it helps!

The post Millionaire Gym Owner: Why Should Fitness Entrepreneurs Be Wealthy? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

What Is Wealth? (And Why Gym Owners Should Pursue It.)

I want the good guys to win.

Unfortunately, our culture has taught us to fear money and wealth.

Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, Jeff Bezos—ask anyone on the street “who is wealthy?” and these are the names you’ll hear in reply.

Or these: Mr. Peanut. Scrooge McDuck. Mr. Lodge. But these are cartoon characters. Caricatures of material wealth.

Ask a person “what are wealthy people like?” and you might hear “lucky, greedy, lazy, corrupt.”

Our culture’s preoccupation with money creates confusion about wealth. And the people talking and thinking about money the most are the ones who don’t have it. They have a mindset of self-protection, scarcity and distrust. Is it any wonder that broke people don’t understand how businesses create wealth and that most wealthy people are really generous?

Unfortunately, these broke people are the ones teaching us about money.

Most people believe that wealth equals having lots of money. But wealth really means freedom.

Wealth and Freedom

In reality, wealth is:

Freedom of time—The opportunity to choose how you invest your day.

Freedom of experience—The opportunity to immerse yourself in new places, new cultures and new adventures. Where will you go? What will you do? What connections will you make? How will your story change?

Freedom of finances—Self-reliance, security. The knowledge that you’ll sleep in a warm bed under a dry roof with a full belly. And the confidence that your position won’t change tomorrow.

Freedom of choice—Independence. The opportunity to decide your own path.

Freedom of pursuit—The opportunity to dedicate yourself to fulfilling your true potential.

Freedom of generosity—The opportunity to share and raise others up.

Freedom of mindset—Abundance, patience, peace. The opportunity to escape a mindset of competition, jealousy and comparison.

Freedom of commitment—The opportunity to commit time and resources for as long as necessary.

Freedom of legacy—The opportunity to leave a multigenerational platform of service or support. The chance to write your own story into the minds of future generations.

Freedom of health—The opportunity to control your own mobility. Freedom from the bonds of medication, weakness or mental decline.

Wealth also means responsibility—for all of the above.
 

Why I Want Gym Owners to Be Wealthy

 
Wealth produces a broad and stable platform.

When our basic needs, security needs and social needs are met, we’re free to work on societal problems. We can dedicate our time to service. We can pursue self-actualization by giving to others: our capital resources, our time and our knowledge.

Wealthy gym owners don’t go out of business. They don’t start Ponzi schemes. They build bigger and better gyms, pay their staff more, and help more people.

They support local teams, run local challenges, elevate their neighborhoods and spread health through their cities.

Money doesn’t solve every problem. But it solves the money problems, and gym owners will solve most of the others.

The post What Is Wealth? (And Why Gym Owners Should Pursue It.) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

$100 Million in Revenue and 100,000 Clients Served

We put 600 of the world’s best coaches and gym owners into a parking lot on June 3.

We used a team of mentors, volunteers and hotel staff to herd, block traffic and cram people into place.

When the mass of fitness pros was assembled and flexing in front of Chicago’s Crowne Plaza, we snapped a very cool pic.

Here’s what the people in that picture represent.

We could talk about wonderful leaders with vision, passion and dedication, but I’d prefer to throw some numbers at you. Two-Brain Business runs on metrics even if the pic above gives our team members all the feelz.

Using a few very rough estimates, here’s what the 2023 summit actually represents:

About 500 gym owners employing 1,500 trainers if we assume each gym has about three coaches.100,000-plus clients served if each gym has about 200 members.$50 million in annual revenue if each gym grosses just $100,000.$100 million in annual revenue if each gym grosses just $200,000.$16.5-$33 million in annual profit if each gym operates at a 33 percent margin.

Those loose figures are probably way, way low.

I know for a fact that just three gyms with owners in attendance generate about $2.3 million per year by themselves. One of those gyms has about 740 members. I met owners of another gym with 670 members. And I know some gym owners who came to Chicago have more than 10 coaches on staff.

You get the point even if the estimates above aren’t exact:

The people in the photo above are changing the health and fitness of a huge number of people all over the world, they’re generating monster revenue as small business owners, they’re creating careers for staff members, and they’re supporting their families.

They’re a huge force in the industry, and we’re gaining momentum as a group.

Here’s some perspective on the growth of the Two-Brain Summit:

2016: 50 people.2017: 150 people.2018: 250 people.2019: 360 people.2020-2021: online summits due to pandemic.2022: 375 people.2023: 600 people.The 2016 Two-Brain Summit.The view from the stage in 2016.#bestfindsbestThe 2023 Two-Brain Summit.
Join Us in 2024

Over the course of the weekend, the owners who attended our summit learned how to run better businesses.

I watched them take action on the spot to improve their gyms. They made connections with other gym owners and expanded their support networks. They met with top vendors who could help them serve clients better and generate significant return on any investment. They solved problems. They worked out together, ate and drank together, and shared high-fives and hugs.

It was incredible, and you couldn’t leave Chicago without a sense of momentum.

I heard so many amazing stories of perseverance and success over the weekend, and I lost count of the number of times I said, “I can’t wait to see where you’re at when we talk here next year.”

I also got to connect with a few people I had met in 2022, and I heard amazing stories of success brought about by hard work and guidance from a mentor.

Here’s what’s clear: The summit is a literal launch pad for a gym business. If you were there, I know you understand.

If you weren’t there this year, put the summit on your calendar in 2024.

Our next summit goes down June 8 and 9, 2024, in Chicago, and tickets are already available here: 2024 Two-Brain Summit.

The post $100 Million in Revenue and 100,000 Clients Served appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Use Other People’s Fitness Events to Make Money

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Events are great, right? They’re a lot of fun for your clients. They give your clients a story to tell. They’re probably good for retention, but they’re a lot of work to pull off. So how can you use other people’s events to make you money and keep your clients around longer? I’m Chris Cooper and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Today, I’m gonna give you three big topics: First, the value of events for keeping and inspiring your clients. Second, you don’t have to run them. And third, I’m gonna give you three ways to make money off other people’s events. If you want more support, head to gymownersunited.com to join a group with thousands of the world’s top fitness entrepreneurs.

Chris Cooper (00:40):
I remember my first-ever CrossFit event. It was 2009. It was down at the Moss Park Armoury in Toronto, Ontario. It was called the CrossFit Ontario Throwdown or something like that. And in the third event, the, event was a thousand-meter row, 50 box jumps and 50 double-unders. And everybody with me that had made the trip from Sault Ste. Marie looked at each other and said, “What’s a double-under?” And I can remember before the event everybody trying to figure out how to do a double under. We’d never even heard of it before. And eventually we kind of figured it out. Some of us did better than others. Some people actually left with whip marks on their backs. But we all left with a great story. And the great thing about events is that for all of your clients, the athletic ones, the ones who have never done anything athletic in their life, events create a story, and stories are sticky.

Chris Cooper (01:32):
When we came home from that event, we decided we needed to run our own. And so in 2009, later on, we created the Catalyst Games, and we gave out these big, giant, fake wrestling belts to the winners. And people wore these things around. Other people had their kids sleeping with these belts at night. They looked like we were in the WWE or whatever. And it gave people a story to tell. And years later, like a decade later, people would come up to me and they would say, “Hey, you remember when Miranda wore her wedding veil at Catalyst Games 2012 and went straight to her wedding after that?”
You remember all that. Stories are amazing for retention because people remember experiences, and if you are giving them an experience that they’ve never had before, whether that’s their first 5K, their first weightlifting competition, or a Spartan race, they are going to always attribute that to you.

Chris Cooper (02:24):
And, in fact, they’ll always associate that with a peak moment in their life, which was due only to you. The great part about an event is retention, but when you’re doing events, it’s all about the story. So, for example, having somebody do their first CrossFit event is an amazing story. Helping somebody do their 12th CrossFit event is not such a great story unless they’re qualifying for the Games or something like that. Novelty is really important with events, and so you should encourage your clients to do new things all the time, including partake in local events. However, setting up events is a lot of work. Take it from a guy in remote Northern Ontario who isn’t within four hours of any other competitive events. We have to find our own here or we have to make them. The problem is that even if you charge for your own events, they take a lot of time.

Chris Cooper (03:14):
And so if you divide the time that you spend organizing the event by the money that you make, a lot of the time you actually come out underwater. You’re losing money or you’re making very little for your time. For example, the first couple of years that we did the Catalyst Games, I would go rent a really cool venue that was off site from my gym, and I would get up at 3:00 a.m., and I would load plates and bars and sleds and sandbags into my truck, and I would drive it down to the venue, and I’d be unloading and setting up and like stringing up banners at 4:30 in the morning so that when people started arriving at 8, it was ready to go and they had a peak experience. Even though we charged 50 bucks for that, you know, half that money went to the T-shirt—most of it, the rest, went to the venue, and then we had to add insurance.

Chris Cooper (04:00):
And by the time you figured it all out, I wasn’t making any money. I had burned an entire weekend. I would catch up on sleep, hopefully, on Sunday. I’d spent a lot of time. I was more burned out. My coaches had to volunteer, so, you know, they were tired on Monday. Again, my clients had a great time, and that for me felt worth it for a while. But I eventually realized there was a way to do this better. And that is to give your clients a peak experience, a story they’ll keep for the rest of their lives without putting out a lot of extra work yourself—and still being profitable. You can make a profit by partnering with other people’s events, okay? If you calculate the value of the time that you put into setting up an event, you’re probably not making very much, and you can actually do better by partnering with other people.

Chris Cooper (04:45):
So I’m gonna give you three ways to do it and three examples of how I’ve done it myself. The first is to find a popular local event like a 5K or a 10K run, something that attracts beginners but that people can also be competitive at. And you wanna just offer training for that event. So, for example, one local event that we support every year is called the Mountain Maple. It’s a cross-country trail run. We run up these giant hills, down these giant hills, through the bush. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a beautiful course, and they get 300 or 400 people every year. But the first year that they ran it, they got 20 or 30 people. And then we got on board and we said, “What if we helped people prepare to run their first 5K? And so we ran a training group that we called Couch to 5K, which was a novel name back then, but everybody uses it now.

Chris Cooper (05:34):
We probably stole it from “Runner’s World” or something. We didn’t invent it, and it was a six-week program. People would show up Tuesday, Thursday night. We charged $79 for it, and it ended the Thursday before the Mountain Maple run. And so people signed up for this event. We probably had about 15 the first year. The coach made four-ninths and did really well per hour. He gave people a little bit of stretching homework to do. They ran together twice a week. They all showed up at the Mountain Maple together, which was about, you know, 15 more people than they’d had the year before. And we showed up with banners and tents and cheering and bells to ring and all kinds of great stuff. And Mountain Maple loved it. And we made money. The next year, Mountain Maple said, “Hey, can you do that again? Can you like bring more people to our event?” And we said, “Yeah, sure. Why don’t you put a link on your website?” So they put a link on their website that said, “If you’re a new runner, learn to run with the Catalyst Couch to 5K program.” And that year we signed up 32 people. So people would think about the run, they would go to the Mountain Maple website, they would say, “I don’t know if I can do it,” or, “I don’t know if I can do it faster than last year,” click through the link, and sign up for our program. And then they would all register for the race and come with us. And eventually we worked out a long-term partnership with the Mountain Maple, and I’m thrilled to say that after a decade we are still really happy to be involved with them sponsoring today.

Chris Cooper (06:55):
That’s the first way that you can do it: You can pick a local event that people want to do and just build a training program for it. You don’t have to call it after the name of the event. We were calling it Couch to 5K. You can just tell people that you are preparing them for this specific event. You know, the 10K local run or whatever. But you don’t have to name your course after the run. If you do name your program after the run, you should work out a profit-share arrangement where they refer to you and they get a kickback when people sign up or when people do your program. Which leads me to the second way that you can do this, which is with really big events, you can actually work out a commission to prepare people and then sign people up.

Chris Cooper (07:35):
Two-Brain has a great partnership with Spartan Race. You’ve probably heard of that. They own Tough Mudder. They own DEKA. And so Two-Brain gyms get a commission when they sign people up for these races. So they become a race host, and when they register their clients for the races, they get a commission back from Spartan Race for signing people up. They also get some free tickets to the race that they could sell to their clients or just give away to their coaches or whatever they want. And they get an SGX certification so that they can offer training for the race in their gym. So they’re making money three ways: referrals, from their free tickets that they can gift or sell, and also from selling their training prep course. So if you’re in Two-Brain, just go to the Toolkit, click on “Events,” and you’ll see ways that you can set these groups up. Or click on “Specialty Groups,” and you’ll get step-by-step training, programming, pricing specifically for Spartan or any of these other groups you want to do, okay?

Chris Cooper (08:32):
It’s all there in the Toolkit for you. You don’t have to do a thing. You don’t have to figure out any of this. Just copy-paste the whole thing, and you’ve got a program. Ask your coaches “who wants to run this group?” They’ll collect four-ninths. They’ll do really well. So, as an example, let’s say that you’re gonna run a Spartan Race with your gym on Sept. 1 of next year. Fantastic. Your clients are gonna get an amazing experience, a great story from a professionally run event. These are awesome. And let’s say that you’re going to sign up 15 people at $50 a head. Well, you’re gonna get a commission on 11 of those, and you’re going to get free tickets for the other four. So you can sell those if you want to or you can use ’em yourself or give ’em to your coaches.

Chris Cooper (09:12):
Whatever you want to do. Then, leading up to September, you’re going to run an eight-week Spartan prep program for about $150 for eight weeks. People are going to come in, you know, once or twice a week. They’re gonna train with your coaches to get ready for Spartan. And, again, like this could be $300—just shooting out examples. And your coach is gonna collect four-ninths of that, which is higher than their normal group rate. They’re gonna have a lot of fun. It’s gonna be novel. People will love it because at Spartan you will attract people from outside your gym into your gym for this specialty program. They’ll pay for it. And then you’ll show up at the Spartan Race with all of your gym’s colors on—running together, having experiences, writing better stories that people will never forget, okay? It’s a win all the way around.

Chris Cooper (09:57):
So that’s the second way is to get commissions from a race. Now you really have to have a partnership with a big brand like Spartan to get commissions from a race. But if you have a larger event in your city, even a CrossFit one, you could probably approach the organizers and say, “Will you give me a 10 percent commission for every athlete that I built bring?” Or 20 percent or whatever. And then you also build out a training program specifically for that. The third way is for the event to bring people to you. Now, if you’re in a major metropolitan area with a lot of CrossFit gyms, let’s say, or a lot of cycling stores, you could host an event and possibly make money, where people from other gyms are coming to you. But the conversion from that is really, really rare.

Chris Cooper (10:45):
DEKA, which is owned by Spartan, is different. You can become a DEKA affiliate through Two-Brain. There’s an amazing deal and an amazing package that only Two-Brain gyms get. You become a DEKA affiliate; you run a DEKA event once, twice, three times a year; and there’s some marketing in your city that draws people into try it out. Now, DEKA is like HYROX, where it’s like this in-gym obstacle-course competition. It’s a fitness event that anybody can do. You probably have all the equipment that you need already except for one or two little things, and you can run it—you make money. There’s a worldwide leaderboard. There’s some marketing to actually bring people into your gyms. They handle awards, you know, the medals and all that kind of cool stuff, too, and you’ve got a worldwide brand working for you. So they advertise, they bring people in.

Chris Cooper (11:31):
That’s the third way that you can make money. You can also set up like training programs for DEKA. So you might have an eight-week DEKA prep course. You might just do DEKA workouts every Friday night through the summer so that people can get their hands on the equipment. Okay? But no matter what, you can still make money by doing this, and it’s not a lot of effort to set up the events. Honestly, DEKA you could set up in about 30 minutes. It’s mostly equipment that you already have. Once you’ve got it in the box, it’s just placing the stuff and then getting people to do timing. And you can get your coaches or other athletes to volunteer to do the timing. Or you could even pay your coaches because these are profitable. So to recap, events are great for client retention and ascension.

Chris Cooper (12:12):
Sometimes they’ll upgrade their membership to train for an event, especially if the event scares ’em a little bit. Okay? They they’re nervous that they might not be able to complete it, or they might not perform well. They might upgrade their membership to train for it or they might sign up for your specialty group. They’re really great for retention because they give clients a story that they can’t get anywhere else. It’ll create a peak moment in that client’s life that the client will always associate with your gym. The key, though, is that you don’t have to run them. If you wanna set up your own events because you love doing that, that’s great. If you wanna do it because you wanna raise funds for charity, fantastic. But if you want to get the benefits of retention and revenue and you don’t really like setting up events, you can still do that by partnering and using other people’s events and preparing your clients and strangers to do those events better. Okay, this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m Chris Cooper. Thanks for listening or watching. You can join our Gym Owners United group today right now if you go to gymownersunited.com, I’m frequently in that group answering questions. We free webinars in there every month. We give away all kinds of free resources every third week. I’d love to have you in there. There’s over 7,000 of us gym owners in there right now offering tools, advice and experience. You can be one of us. It’s free. Join today: gymownersunited.com. Thanks for watching!

The post How to Use Other People’s Fitness Events to Make Money appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Kill Poorly Attended Classes That Actually Cost You Money

That tiny class is costing you.

In almost every microgym, a class of one to two people is actually costing the gym money.

Even if the class brings in a few dollars, it’s not worth keeping.

Let’s use an example based on the calculations from the previous post in this series. Imagine a gym averages $6.67 per attendee in a class.

1. If the owner pays a coach $20 or $25 to run the tiny class for one or two clients, they’re actually losing money on the session.

2. If the owner takes the class personally, they’re working in the gym, not on it, and they’re missing out on opportunities to grow the business.

Many times, the owner would actually be better off working the morning shift at a local drive-thru window!

Simply making a class time available won’t result in a full house. “If you build it, they will come” is a fantasy. But still, none of us gets this right the first time.

Here’s how to set your schedule: “Setting Your Schedule.”

Here’s how to change your schedule after you’ve set it (yes, it can be done!):

Your greatest leverageable resource is time.

You can invest it in a class that pays you $20.

You can invest it into a personal-training client who pays you $70.

You can invest it into marketing, ordering supplies, designing T-shirts, tasting supplements, arguing on Facebook or scrolling on Instagram. It’s your time and your choice.

But knowing the value of each hour you spend working in or on your business is critical for your success.

The post How to Kill Poorly Attended Classes That Actually Cost You Money appeared first on Two-Brain Business.