Chris Cooper's Blog, page 68
June 13, 2023
Are Group Classes Costing You Money? Here’s How to Find Out.
For a decade from 1998 to 2008, I coached people 1:1, selling my attention for an hour at a time.
I found CrossFit in 2008, and after coaching our very first CrossFit group at Catalyst (for free—facepalm!), I remember saying, “This is all I want to do for the rest of my life.”
A year later, I had two locations. I showed up at 5 a.m. to mop one and coach a tiny “class” of two people at 6. At 7, I coached a group of four or five. Then I rushed to the other location to coach my PT clients until 4 p.m.
All the while, I wondered why I was losing money.
It all comes down to simple math.
Read on: I’m going to show you how to figure out exactly what your groups are paying you.
8 Steps to Calculating the Value of Group Classes
1. Add up the total revenue you receive from all group training each month.
2. Divide that by the number of classes you run at your gym per month. That’s the average value of each class.
3. Now go back to your total group-training revenue. Divide that by the number of people paying for group training. That’s your average revenue per group-training client.
4. Next, divide the number above by average attendance. How many times does the average client attend a group in a month? This will tell you the value of one person attending one group.
5. Finally, pull up your attendance-tracking sheet and look at each group you run. Multiply the average attendance for each group by the average value of a group-training client. That will give you a specific value for each group.
6. Compare the average value for each class (from Step 2) against that of each class on your schedule. Which classes are pulling you up and which are pulling you down?
7. Compare the average value for each class against your personal-training rate. Are there any spots where you’d make more money taking a 1:1 client instead of running a small class?
8. ***Danger*** Compare the average value for each class against what you’d be paid to work at McDonald’s. Maybe skip this step if the answer scares you.
Example
Sarah has 100 clients and grosses $10,000 per month in group revenue.
She runs 40 classes per week, or 172 classes per month (40 x 4.3 weeks per month).
Her average revenue per class is $58.14.
Sarah’s average client pays $100 per month. Her average client attends 15 times.
The average value of a class attendee at Sarah’s gym is $6.67.
That means her average group size is about eight or nine people. (Simply divide Sarah’s revenue per group class by the average value of an attendee.)
If Sarah runs a class for eight people, she makes $53.36 an hour. If the class has nine people, she makes $60.03 per hour.
Sarah charges $65 per hour for personal training, so she needs to get 10 people in a class to earn $66.70 and beat her PT rate.
If fewer than 10 people show up for her class, she’d make more doing a 1:1 session in that time.
If 11 or more people show up for a class, Sarah makes more than $73 per hour.
Keep in mind that our 2022 “State of the Industry” report revealed that average group-class attendance in microgyms is 6.6. Almost no one in the data set is consistently running classes with more than 10 attendees all the time. Building your business on the target of running large classes all day is just not a good idea.
A mentor can help Sarah solve this problem.
Big Questions to Answer
Sarah’s mentor might ask these questions and many more:
1. What’s the best use of Sarah’s time in any hour? For example, should she cancel her poorly attended 10-a.m. class and fill the slot with a high-value PT client? (Almost certainly yes!)
2. How soon can we adjust her group rates to reflect the value of her coaching?
3. How could she acquire more PT clients? (Two-Brain has an exact plan for this.)
4. Could she sell hybrid memberships to increase client value?
5. Could she start using semi-private training to generate more revenue per hour and give clients personalized service?
Our mentors evaluate each situation carefully, then present a step-by-step plan to each gym owner. That plan includes clear tactics and implementation plans, done-for-you assets, guidance, support, and accountability.
In case you’ve determined you need to move or cancel some classes, I’ll tell you how to do that in the next post in this series.
The post Are Group Classes Costing You Money? Here’s How to Find Out. appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 12, 2023
Are Your Group Classes Costing You Money? Calculations and Solutions.
Chris Cooper (00:00):
At Two-Brain Business, we have hard data on class size and gyms, and we know the ideal number of participants. So gym owners don’t need to guess anymore. You don’t have to try and figure out your culture or any other unmeasurable elements to figure out how big should your classes be. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Today, I’ll tell you how many people should be in your classes. I’ll tell you how much each class is paying you, and I will give you a plan to address those sessions that are only attended by one or two people. What do you do with them? I’m also gonna give you proof from the largest data set in the microgym industry. So first, let’s start with data: real numbers on retention. There’s two primary metrics we want to track here. The first is called length of engagement or LEG.
Chris Cooper (00:50):
It’s a key business metric, and what we’re measuring is how long a client is likely to stay in your gym. The second metric is adherence. This is a key retention metric, and adherence asks “how often do clients show up in relation to the plans they’ve purchased?” So if they’ve purchased a plan for three times a week, how many times do they actually show up compared to what they’ve bought? Now, both long-term retention—LEG—and adherence are highest with one-on-one training. And this makes sense. A client has paid a premium to have an appointment with somebody, so they’re very likely to keep it. This one-on-one setting is also where clients make the fastest progress. So they have both the intrinsic and the extrinsic motivation to show up. But when you go to a two-on-one, three-on-one, four-on-one class, retention and adherence both drop.
Chris Cooper (01:48):
There’s a few reasons. In my experience, the added partner accountability effect is really offset by the partner conflict. So, for example, “Well, Coop, Sam is tied up at work, so we’ll just cancel our two-on-one training for both of us, and we’ll make it up next week.” So instead of one partner dragging the other one into the gym, one partner can actually drag the other person down or derail them. Now the numbers are consistent when you go from two to six, but then they go up. So a class of seven has the second-best retention and adherence rates after one-on-one training. Best retention: one on one. Second best: seven to one coach. The benefits of groups really start to show for the gym at about seven people, and that value doesn’t change much until you get to about 12. So retention and adherence, both are fairly high between seven and 12 people in your class, but then they drop at 13, and they absolutely plummet off a cliff after that.
Chris Cooper (02:49):
And the data makes sense when you think about it. Groups larger than about a dozen people can be fun, but people can also feel as if they’re a number. Like “nobody will miss me if I’m not here.” Or the coach’s attention might be split too many ways. So some participants don’t get the personal contact and connections that they need to stay around long term. If you think about it in your own gym, think about the clients who’ve been there the longest—five, six years. They probably started when your groups were small, and they had lots of one one-on-one attention. They had lots of relationship building, lots of one-on-one coaching from you. Now here’s one note on the data. This data is based on one coach per class, with participants doing variations of the same workout. So they’re doing CrossFit, but it’s scaled.
Chris Cooper (03:35):
They’re doing yoga, and they’re all doing the same moves, but they’re doing slightly different variations with blocks or straps or whatever. And adding a second coach might solve part of this problem, and adding a client success manager might improve the connection between classes. Part two: Some well-run gyms use semi-private training, and they have amazing retention when four clients do personalized programs at the same time. But this requires a really precise plan executed by a skilled coach who can give significant levels of personal attention to up to four clients at once. And successful semi-private programs are backed up by airtight, fully documented client journeys designed to maximize retention and adherence. So small differentiator here: a small group, poor retention. They’re all doing the same workout, slightly modified for each person. Semi-private: high retention. They’re all doing their own specific workout program, and they’re getting one-on-one attention, but the coach is going from you to me to the next person, too.
Chris Cooper (04:39):
So, in summary, the people who do personal training have the best retention rates. They stick around the longest, and they’re most likely to show up. If you’re doing group classes, try and keep your group classes in the seven-to-12 range for maximal retention. Now let’s talk about are group classes actually costing you money? Here’s how to find out. For a decade from 1998 to 2008, I coached people one on one, selling my attention for an hour at a time. I found CrossFit around 2007. And in 2008 we tried our first CrossFit trial group at Catalyst. It was free, you know, face palm, but I remember saying, “This is all I wanna do for the rest of my life. This is so much fun. It feels like when I’m doing workouts with my friends.” A year or two later, I had two locations. I showed up at 5 a.m. to mop the one location, and I would coach this tiny class of two people at 6 and then another tiny class of three people at 7.
Chris Cooper (05:40):
And then I would rush back to my personal-training studio. I’d keep coaching one on one until 4 p.m. and then go back to the CrossFit group-training gym. That whole time I was wondering why I was losing money. But it all comes down to simple math. So I’m gonna show you how to figure out exactly what your groups are paying you. So there’s eight steps to calculating the value of your group classes. Step 1 is to add up the total revenue that you receive from all group training each month. Step 2 is to divide that by the number of classes you run at your gym per month. That’s the average value of each class. Now go back to your total group training revenue. This is Step 3. Divide that by the number of people paying for group training. That’s your average revenue per person per class.
Chris Cooper (06:31):
That’s a really important number to know. Fourth, divide that number, revenue per person per class, by your average attendance. So how many times does the average client attend a group in a month? This will tell you the value of one person attending one class. Fifth, pull up your attendance tracking sheet and look at each group you run. So multiply the average attendance for each group by the average value of one single group training client. I’m gonna go through an example in a moment—don’t worry. But this will give you a specific value for each group. And then you compare that average value for each class against that of each class on your schedule. And then you’ll see what the average class drives in revenue, and which classes are pulling you up and which classes are actually pulling you down. And then you compare the average value of each class against your personal-training rate.
Chris Cooper (07:26):
And you can ask yourself if there any spots where you would make more money taking a one-on-one client instead of running a small class. Now, this last step, number eight, is kind of dangerous. You might not wanna do it. But compare the average value of each class against what you would be paid to work at McDonald’s. And maybe skip that step if that scares you. Some people are delivering classes for less than they would make driving an Uber or working at the drive-thru window. All right, so here’s our example. Let’s say that Sarah has a gym with a hundred clients, and she grosses $10,000 per month in group revenue only. She runs 40 classes a week, or 172 classes per month, which is 40 classes times 4.3 weeks in a month. That means her average revenue per class is $58.14. Now, Sarah’s average client, again pays a hundred bucks a month, and the average client attends about 15 classes a month.
Chris Cooper (08:20):
That means the average value of one person attending one class at Sarah’s gym is $6.67. Now her average group size is about eight or nine people. So spread out across all her groups, if she took a mean average, she’d have eight or nine people in each one. If Sarah runs a class for eight people, she makes $53.36 an hour in revenue. That’s not income. If the class has nine people, she makes $60.03 per hour. Now Sarah charges $65 per hour for personal training. So she needs to get 10 people in a class to earn $66.70 cents and beat her personal-training rate. That’s where it’s worth it. If fewer than 10 people show up for her class, she would actually make more by doing a one-on-one session in that same time. If 11 or more people show up for that class, Sarah makes more than 73 bucks per hour.
Chris Cooper (09:16):
Now keep in mind that our 2022 “State of the Industry” report revealed that the average group class attendance in a microgym is 6.6 people. Almost nobody in the data set is consistently running classes with an average of over 10 attendees all the time. So building your business on the target of running large classes all day is just not a good idea. A mentor could help Sarah solve this problem, and Sarah’s mentor might ask these questions and a few others. So first, what is the best use of Sarah’s time in any hour? For example, should she cancel her poorly attended 10-a.m. class and fill that spot with a high-value personal training client? And the answer is almost certainly yes. Second, how soon can we adjust her group rates to reflect the value of her coaching? So if her group rates go up by even 20 percent, then the number of people per class that she needs to make money goes down.
Chris Cooper (10:14):
Amazing. Third, how could she acquire more personal-training clients? And Two-Brain has an exact plan for this. Fourth, could she sell hybrid memberships to increase client value? Almost definitely. Fifth, could she start using semi-private training to generate more revenue per hour and give clients that personalized one-on-one service? Now, our mentors evaluate each situation carefully and then they present a step-by-step plan to each gym owner. That plan includes clear tactics and implementation plans, done-for-you assets, guidance, support, accountability. And in case you’re determined that you need to move or cancel some classes. I’m gonna tell you how to do that next—because the reality is that if you’re undercharging, then you’re working really, really hard to get a lot of people into a class that might actually cause your retention to dip. Look, if you need 13 people in a class or 14 people in a class to make your revenue target, you are entering into the territory of high churn.
Chris Cooper (11:20):
And if you compare what I said at the start of this episode, where retention starts to drop off at the 13th member, but you need more than 13 in a class, then you are running a model where you’re not gonna have amazing retention. The two numbers are conflicting with each other. So at this point, you’re actually better off to have fewer people per class or switch to semi-private or personal training and raise your average revenue per member up. Your retention will be better. You’ll have a more solid base. Am I saying that’s the case all the time—that you can’t make a good living with a group-training model? Of course you can make a good living with a group-training model. The key, though, is that after you crest that number of like 13 people in a group, you have to be able to afford a second coach or your retention is just gonna get worse and worse and worse.
Chris Cooper (12:14):
And to be able to afford that second coach, that means everybody in the group has to be paying more so that you can cover that expense. So whether you’re going for groups under 12 or groups over 12, your only play is to have high client value. And when Sarah is charging a hundred bucks in that example, she did not have high client value. And so she was caught either way. Either she has a small group size—which most do, under 10—and she doesn’t make any money on that group. So she can’t pay a coach. So she has to do it herself, and she winds up making a low income or she folds. That group with 30 people has horrible retention. She churns people out really quickly, has to turn to marketing to replace those people and gets burned out. You know, so it’s it charging your actual value or charging a high value for your service is really the most important point here.
Chris Cooper (13:09):
But this is how retention goes back and forth with client value and how even if you have a gym with 300 members and you’re running classes of 30 people, this is what can sink you. So, alright, what do you do with these classes that are under attended? Do you kill it or do you fill it? In almost every microgym, there’s one or two little tiny classes of one or two people that’s actually costing the gym money. Even if the class brings in a few bucks, it’s just not worth keeping. So let’s use an example based on the calculation from the previous part of this talk, right? Imagine a gym makes $6.67 per attendee in a class. So first, if the owner pays a coach to run that tiny class for one or two clients, the owner is actually losing money on the session.
Chris Cooper (13:57):
If the owner takes the class personally and coaches it themselves, then they’re skipping the opportunity to grow their gym. They’re selling their time very cheaply. They could be better using that hour to do marketing and sales or being mentored. And many times, the owner would actually be better working the morning shift at a local drive-thru or driving an Uber. Simply making a class time available on the schedule won’t fill the class. That old acorn of “if you build it, they will come,” it’s a total fantasy, but still, none of us gets this right the first time. So here’s how to set your schedule. You can click the link below and I’ve got another link for you to click about how to change your schedule after you set it, since none of us get it right the first time. You’re best off setting up your schedule based on when your best clients are available to come.
Chris Cooper (14:46):
And that might have something to do with your location. And then set it quarterly so that you can change this the calendar over time. All right? Remember, your greatest leverageable resource as an entrepreneur is your time. You can invest that time in a class that pays you 20 bucks or you can invest it into a personal-training client who pays you 70. You could also invest it into marketing or ordering supplies or designing T-shirts or tasting supplements or arguing on Facebook with other gym owners who are posting memes on Instagram. It’s your time and your choice, but knowing the value of how you spend that time is absolutely critical for your success. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if you want to ask questions about this or any episode, we have a free group called Gym Owners United. There’s over 7,000 gym owners in there. It’s a very friendly, very positive group. Nobody’s gonna try and sell you anything in that group. Nobody’s gonna call you out or say that your question is bad or dumb. We’ve removed all those people. Just go to gymownersunited.com. Jump in and grow your gym.
The post Are Your Group Classes Costing You Money? Calculations and Solutions. appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
Hard Gym Data: The Ideal Size for Group Classes Is 7-12 People
We have years of hard data on class size in gyms, and we know the ideal number of participants.
Gym owners don’t need to guess anymore.
You don’t have to try and consider “culture” or any other unmeasurable elements.
In this series, I’ll give you proof from the largest data set in the microgym industry. Here, I’ll tell you how many people should be in your classes. In the next post, I’ll tell you how much each class is paying you. Finally, I’ll give you a plan to address those sessions that are only attended by one or two people.
First, the data.
Real Numbers
Length of engagement (LEG) is a key business metric for gyms: how long is a client likely to stay in your gym?
Read more about LEG here: “Don’t Skip LEG Day”
Adherence is a key retention metric: how often do clients show up in relation to the plans they’ve purchased?
Read more here: “Retention and Adherence”
Both long-term retention and adherence are highest with 1:1 training.
This makes sense: A client has an appointment to meet with someone, has paid a premium for that appointment and is likely to keep it. This 1:1 setting is also where clients make the fastest progress, so they have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to show up.
But retention and adherence drop for 2:1 training for several reasons. In my experience, the added partner accountability is offset by partner conflict.
For example: “Sam is tied up at work, so we’ll just cancel our 2:1 training for both of us and make it up next week.” Instead of one partner dragging the other into the gym, one partner can just as easily derail the other.
The numbers are consistent between two clients and six, but then they go up.
A class of seven people has the second-best retention and adherence rates after 1:1 training. The benefits of groups really start to show for the gym at seven people.
Those values don’t change much until you hit more than 12 people. Retention and adherence values drop at 13 and then plummet after that.
The data makes sense if you think about it: Groups larger than about a dozen can be fun, but people can also feel as if “no one will miss me if I’m not there.” Or the coach’s attention might be split too many ways that some participants don’t get the personal contact and connections they need.
Of note:
This data is based on one coach per class, with participants doing variations of the same general workout. Adding a second coach might solve part of the problem.Adding a client success manager (CSM) might solve the other part.Some well-run gyms use semi-private training and have great retention when four clients do personalized programs at the same time, but this requires a precise plan executed by a skilled coach who can give significant levels of personal attention to up to four clients at once. And successful semi-private programs are backed up by airtight, fully documented client journeys designed to maximize retention and adherence.
In summary:
Don’t worry if you have huge groups or tiny groups. In the next post in this series, I’ll tell you how to identify your best and worst slots. And in the final post, I’ll tell you how to drop your worst groups.
The post Hard Gym Data: The Ideal Size for Group Classes Is 7-12 People appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 9, 2023
Sipping on Systems With Jersey’s Gym-Owning Whiskey Distiller
If business systems bore you, click out of this post.
You can fix your gym another time.
But if you’re interested in improving your business today, read on.
I talk to the top gym owners in the world every month on the podcast “Run a Profitable Gym”—you should subscribe.
In May, I spoke to Tommy Alfinito. He runs Hygge Fitness in New Jersey, and he joined me on the show to talk about how his business grossed about US$57,000 in April 2023 and made Two-Brain’s Top 10 leaderboard. (You can view it here.)
Before the show, I chatted with Tommy about whiskey and spirits. Tommy had actually made time to talk to me even though he was cutting the ribbon at his new business, Wildfether Distilling, later that day.
Tommy’s been working hard to get his new business off the ground, and it was hard not to spend 30 minutes digging into all the challenges of developing a property and setting up a distillery. But we turned our attention back to the gym business anyway.
During the show—listen to it here—Tommy told me he works about four hours every month at Hygge Fitness. He’s not there all the time. He just has weekly one-hour meetings to ensure everything is on track at his microgym, and then he moves on to his other projects.
The gym, operated by trusted staff members, just keeps serving high-value clients and cranking out profit for Tommy in the background.
How is this possible?
Business systems.
Tommy systemizes everything—so much so that his coaches know exactly how many times they must check in with each member during a “perfectly coached class.”
Maybe that stuff is boring.
Or maybe it’s the foundation that allows an entrepreneur to serve high-value fitness clients, create careers, generate stable income and then pursue passions—like cooking up some small-batch bourbon to pour in a tasting room built into a renovated character building from 1857.
Systemize Something Today
Tommy is just the latest top gym owner to tell me that business systems are one of the main keys to his success. Every month, a Top 10 gym owner says something similar. It’s actually a relentless drumbeat from successful fitness entrepreneurs: “Systems, systems, systems.”
No one is winging it or making it up as they go at the world’s top gyms. Everyone is operating from playbooks and manuals. This is without exception.
So if you’d like to move into the top echelon of gym owners, you can take a step in that direction today. Here’s what to do:
Systemize something at your business today.
Start small. You don’t have to write your entire staff playbook today. Just get one system in place—“how to clean the gym to an A+ standard” is an easy one to hit first. But you could also create standard operating procedures for a few other things in an hour or two:
How to open the gym and greet clients (operations).How to run the “absent clients report” and reconnect with missing members (retention).How to manage the quarterly retail presale process (revenue generation).
I’m sure you can think of other simple tasks you can systemize with an SOP.
My point: Pick one task and document everything, then put that page in your staff playbook. Repeat until every task in your business is documented, then start assigning these tasks to others and “climb the value ladder.”
If you don’t, your business will putter along at a C+ level and you’ll eventually burn out.
If you do, you’ll be well on your way to the A+ level, where you’ll have the income and freedom of time to expand your entrepreneurial vision.
And if you’d like to level up but feel overwhelmed by the task of systemizing your gym business, a mentor can help.
Yes, systems are boring. But Two-Brain will provide focus, accountability and a host of done-for-you resources that make the process smooth, simple and pain-free. To find out more, book a call here.
The post Sipping on Systems With Jersey’s Gym-Owning Whiskey Distiller appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 8, 2023
The Client Cap: Why We’ve Got One and Why It Might Improve Your Gym
Chris Cooper (00:00):
There are 868 gyms in Two-Brain Business, and we’re gonna cap it at a thousand. I’m Chris Cooper, this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Today, I’m gonna share our decision to cap our mentorship practice at 1,000 gym owners worldwide. I’m gonna break this down into three topics. First, how a cap helps our current clients, the gym owners who are in the Two-Brain Business mentorship practice now. Second, how a cap helps you, the future client who maybe hasn’t joined Two-Brain yet. And third, how a cap will help our business and could help your business. If you want more info and support or you want to ask me questions or just discuss the idea of capping your business, head to gymownersunited.com to join a group with thousands of the world’s top fitness entrepreneurs.
Chris Cooper (00:54):
Last January, I was sitting with the head coach and the general manager of my gym, and we were working through our targets and our metrics. The gym was still a little bit topsy-turvy after emerging from two years of government lockdowns. And we were trying to set up “what is our mission?” so that we could work backward from that and say “here’s how many clients we want at which ARM and at what LEG”—basically set our targeted metrics. And so I said, “Guys, what if we capped membership at 150 clients? We already know that 150 clients is achievable. You know, in the past, Catalyst has been up to about 230 clients. We know that it’s more than enough revenue because we know what our ARM is. We know that we keep people on average for just over 17 months with 150 clients. We can hit all of our revenue and profit targets.”
Chris Cooper (01:46):
And I thought my staff was gonna give me a little bit of pushback on this because they’re helpful people—they want to help everybody. But instead, one of them said, “150 sounds great,” and the other said, “How about 125?” And so I asked them like, “What appeals to you about this, this cap?” And they’re like, “Well, we’ll know every single person in the program. We’ll know every single thing about them. We’ll never forget their names. We’ll know if they’re making progress. We’ll have an easier relationship. There are so many benefits to just having a tighter relationship to everybody in the gym. So if we can do it with 125 people, why would we want 200? Like if we can make a good living and the gym can make money, why would we want more people than that?” And so that was the start of my thinking on why a cap is actually best.
Chris Cooper (02:36):
And in our gym, what we’re actually doing is measuring outcomes. And so one of the metrics that we’re playing with right now is “how do we know that we’ve changed their life?” And we came up with a few different ways to measure that, and I share that in our RampUp program. But the thing is, if we have 150 people in my gym at one time and we keep them long enough to create a sustainable, life-changing habit in them, we can actually have a bigger impact on our community than if we have more people but a higher churn rate. So that’s what we’re focusing on in Two-Brain Business, though we have achieved some amazing things in the industry already. And I don’t take credit for all this. I am lucky enough to be the connector and sometimes the figurehead for this movement. But the mentors and the analysts and the media team are really what make these changes happen.
Chris Cooper (03:23):
And so what we’ve been able to create are hundreds of gym owners making a hundred thousand dollars per year. That never really happened on a consistent basis before mentorship. We’ve also ascended 40 people to the level of being an actual millionaire. So this is not like the paper or the Instagram millionaire that’s like, you know, leaning on the rented Lambo. These are people who if they sold all of their assets and paid off all their debts, they’d still have a million dollars in their hand. They’re legit millionaires. And there were none in the industry before we started producing them. That’s not to say there are no other ones now, but when I looked back in 2008 to find people who had made a million dollars and were able to retire, I couldn’t find any. So I’m really proud that we’ve been able to produce over 40 now.
Chris Cooper (04:11):
And the beautiful part is that we’re producing on average about two a month. We’ve figured this out. And that’s my point. Now that we’ve figured out how to get gym owners to being millionaires, to having good net worth, to making consistently a hundred thousand dollars per year, having a little bit of time left over to spend with their kids, a little bit of money to reinvest, I wanna do it faster. And so now that we’ve mapped out what the most successful gym owners in the world are doing, I think we’re gonna start analyzing “how do we get them there faster?”—the stuff that took me a decade to reach. You know, status; a gym that runs itself; a happy, loving gym that I love to go to for noon group but really don’t operate; a building that I own—that stuff took me a decade. But some of the fastest gyms in Two-Brain are doing that in three years now.
Chris Cooper (04:59):
And so we wanna turn our analytical lens inward again and say like, “How are the fastest gyms doing it?” Now that we’ve proven we can do it better than anybody else, we wanna know how we can do it faster. And so we’re really focusing on speed to outcome in our research and data and mentorship. And over the next few years, you’re going to see these results compound: people reaching higher levels faster than ever before, creating a really amazing career option for people, where gym owner, personal trainer, CrossFit coach wasn’t really a viable career option in the past. We wanna be able to get them there faster and make gym ownership a more appealing career to more people so that we can have more gyms saving more lives. Next within Two-Brain, we wanna preserve our culture. Right now, gyms are joining Two-Brain so fast that some people who are coming in don’t really know a lot about us.
Chris Cooper (05:54):
They see our success, they see our data, they’re really fired up, and they wanna come in and join. And that’s awesome. The problem is that if you’ve got one person who’s not completely on board yet, they can distract 10 other people. And so what we wanna do is make sure that we’re preserving our values and culture, especially in our RampUp program, because when you join a new tribe, you are heavily influenced by the others in the tribe or your cohort of people who are joining with you. If there’s some skepticism or some inaction in that cohort, you are going to be slowed down. Where if you join with 20 other people who are all in, who are extremely focused and getting results quickly, you will be caught up in that tide and pulled along with them. And so “preserving our culture” really means not slamming the door, building the fence, not letting anybody in—it just means slowing it to the people who are absolutely certain that they want to be here. The next reason that this is better for our clients is it creates more focus and less distraction. I’ll be honest here: When I see another business coaching company offering something included in their services, I feel like I need to build that thing, too, and just have it available to our clients. But the reality is half the time that stuff’s not even necessary. It’s a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have. Like, you know, “we will mentor your coaches for you.” Well, that’s a nice-to-have. If your gym is already a 10 outta 10 and your coaches are a seven outta 10, yeah, like improve your coaching. But the reality is that most gyms haven’t really exceeded a three outta 10 in their ops and systems and processes.
Chris Cooper (07:35):
There are so many more important opportunities for them and so many bigger fires to fight that you should fight them first. However, because other business-coaching organizations are offering to mentor the gym’s coaches for them, we’ve felt like, “Oh, we need to do that, too.” I don’t wanna do that. I want to get gym owners results based on focus and filtering and by reducing overwhelm. And so by capping our mentorship practice at a thousand, there’ll be fewer distractions for me and the media and the content team to cover everything. And instead, we can just focus on what’s really important to getting people to a $100K net owner benefit, and then eventually, if they want to, to a million dollars in net worth faster. And the final reason that I think the cap is better for our clients is that every single person who comes in the door is not really competing for a seat but they’re being considered for a seat.
Chris Cooper (08:30):
And so if we take on 20 new people a month, which is, you know, what we’ll do at a cap of a thousand, what will happen is we will ask ourselves, “Is this person a great fit for our tribe right now?” And that means, you know, “Do they need another year on their own before they’re really ready for mentorship or before they’re a great fit?” Or, you know, “Is this person better suited to be referred elsewhere?” So we’ll be free to refer ’em elsewhere if we think they could be a fit for a different program. It’s not really competitors anymore; it’s really collaborators. And if somebody comes in and we think they’d be a better fit somewhere else, we can refer ’em somewhere else. This might be somebody else in the CrossFit space. More and more, what we’re seeing is if somebody comes in and they have a BJJ gym or a cheer gym or a gymnastics gym, we have collaborators that we can refer out to that’ll be an even better fit for them.
Chris Cooper (09:21):
So that means that the people who are coming into our mentorship practice are doing exactly the same things for exactly the same people for exactly the same reasons as our current clients. And that will speed up everybody because we’ll all be moving faster in the same direction. Why is this best for our future clients? You know, a couple months ago, one of my favorite people on the planet, Oskar Johed, said to me, “You’re a really fascinating case study because you built this enormously successful business, but you give everything away for free.” He’s like, “I study you as much as I admire what you’ve built.” And I was really grateful for that. And it really got me to thinking like it’s true. But a lot of really successful people have done this. When Greg Glassman built CrossFit, he gave the workouts away for free for decades, right?
Chris Cooper (10:10):
Seth Godin gives away his knowledge for free every single day. And other people that I admire publish their knowledge for free because they all understand that knowledge does not solve the problem, right? They give the knowledge for free, and then they sell the coaching—or the certification in Greg’s case. And so for us, what we’re saying is this cap at a thousand is actually better for future clients because we will maintain our commitment to publishing knowledge and guides and tools and tactics for free. I’ll be honest with you: When somebody comes into one of our groups and really needs help, quite often we’ll go on Amazon and buy a copy of my book or another book and just ship it to them, right? Not as a sales tactic but just because that’s what they need for help. And so capping it a thousand will let us keep our focus on giving stuff away for free.
Chris Cooper (11:02):
You know, over the years I’ve heard so many times “your free stuff is better than everybody else’s paid stuff put together.” And that’s because we published this stuff so that you can make your gym more successful and be ready for mentorship instead of being stressed and overwhelmed by asking “how do I solve these problems?” I started off publishing for four years for free without selling any coaching or mentorship because that’s what I needed as a gym owner. And so I was like writing letters to myself, and it just happened to help hundreds and thousands of other people. So for new clients, this cap will benefit them in other ways, too. Another one is that we’ll be able to better balance short-term tactics with long-term strategy. So right now what happens when somebody comes in to RampUp is we want to give them really quick wins.
Chris Cooper (11:51):
We want our program to pay for itself as fast as possible, like within the first week if we can do it. And so when you come in, we give you a quick marketing win before we even start you working on the strategies that are gonna build the foundation for your business for the next 30 years. So it’s, you know, “Do this thing. Let’s get five clients, and now let’s work on your systems. Do this thing, let’s get three referrals, and now let’s work on your playbook.” Et cetera. We will find less, I guess, haste to get to the marketing and have more time to focus on building the long-term strategies if we’re bringing in clients more slowly. So a cap of a thousand doesn’t mean, again, like we’re locking people out and never taking new clients. We’ll still welcome about 20 new people to our mentorship practice a month.
Chris Cooper (12:38):
But a slower inflow will mean a more selective process where we’re spending less time fighting fires and more time working on long-term strategies. It will also afford us the opportunity to train skills. So where we’ve had challenges in the past is a client will come in, and we’ll give them a tactic and say, “Here you go: Do this. This week you need to make money.” But they won’t have time or mental space. They’ll be burned out, overwhelmed, overworked, stressed, and they won’t get the work done. And really what it comes down to here is we need to be developing entrepreneurial skills as well as sharing strategies and tactics. We need to be able to teach people how to focus, how to block off their time and be successful at implementing the things so that they can get the things done that will make them successful, earn them the money and keep them growing in our practice.
Chris Cooper (13:31):
Right now, it is hard to teach entrepreneurial skills, especially in the first phase of mentorship, because you’re going so fast and doing so much and getting results so quickly. It would be nice to be able to teach some entrepreneurial skills, and I’m sure I’ll be talking more about this in the future. Finally, I want my staff, my mentors to have permission to do whatever it takes to get a client results. When you’re onboarding 40, 45 gyms every single month, you’re busy. And I have a staff of well over 50 mentors worldwide, and we have a process that works, that we follow and we tailor to every specific gym. That said, when one gym needs more help, I want the mentor to have the time and the brain capacity to jump in and give them whatever they need. Right now, the amount of support that you get from Two-Brain is incredible.
Chris Cooper (14:20):
It’s one-on-one mentorship. You’re on a call with a mentor like at least every couple weeks one on one. It’s not a group call. It’s not just coaching at you. It’s like solving your problems with you. You’re on a call with somebody in our team within 48 hours of signing up. You’ve got access to modules and help and tools and tactics within three minutes of signing up. But I also want mentors to be a little bit more flexible and have the time to be able to do that when somebody needs extra time. I’m lucky that I have the time to do that. Every single day, I pick up the phone and call or text or leave a voicemail for about 10 of our clients or our team. And I want mentors to be able to enjoy that, too, ‘cause it’s a lot of fun.
Chris Cooper (15:03):
Finally, the third reason that we’re adding the cap is it’s best for our business. And I’m sharing this outta transparency because I think it can help your business, too. A couple of months ago, what we realized was that we’re not really in competition with these other business-mentoring things that are cropping up in the space. What actually happens is that some clients might not be ready for Two-Brain yet. They might not be ready for the intense mentorship that you get in Two-Brain. Like they can’t work on, you know, fitting a one-on-one call in every second week, for example, because they’re just too overwhelmed. So for some of these clients, they’re actually better to start elsewhere and then ascend to us. You know, get a little quick win from this marketing agency and now you’ve got some breathing room and you’re ready to build your systems. And that’s okay.
Chris Cooper (15:56):
You know, in the past, it was like jealousy or my skepticism where I was like, “Oh, that’s crap. I’ve gotta save everybody from getting scammed.” And the reality is some of our best clients have started elsewhere and ascended up to our mentorship practice. We commonly see our clients using the hashtag #bestfindsbest, and we wanna be a living example of that. So we know that the best clients in other programs eventually find their way to Two-Brain, and Two-Brain clients who are curious about other programs might do those things in addition to Two-Brain, or they might go try that and then come back. And it always works out that the best finds the best. We don’t wanna feel like we’re in competition for every client. If you’re in competition for every client, you create bad habits of like building features that maybe your clients don’t need or might even slow them down to getting to their actual goals.
Chris Cooper (16:49):
I mentioned that earlier. If you are trying to attract every client, you’re not focused on ascending the best clients as quickly as you can, and we actually want to be in line with our mission. See, our mission is to change a million lives by making 10,000 gyms profitable and financially successful so the owners can stay in the game for 30 years. They build a gym that they love to own, and clients stick around long enough to get great results. That means that we’re actually best to work with the top thousand gyms in the industry. If we wanna change the fitness industry to have the greatest possible impact, that means that we should work with the best. And here’s why: The best gym owners expand rapidly. The best gym owners open multiple locations that are successful on Day 1 because the things that made them the best gym owners also make them the fastest-expanding gym owners.
Chris Cooper (17:46):
If your gym is really successful with 150 clients or whatever, or a hundred or 50 or 500, and you’ve got that systemized to the point where you can replicate it over and over, you will expand faster than a gym owner who’s just starting or they’re 10 years in and they’re still trying to figure it out. And so that’s what we want to do. Now I’ve heard, you know, even from Greg Glassman, like the libertarian ideal is that if you’ve got five gyms in a city and one gym closes, that’s okay because the other four are better. And all of the clients from the closed gym will go to those other gyms and get a better experience. And the coaches from the gym that close will go to those other gyms and get better jobs. And the owners of the failed gym will go and become members or employees at the better gyms.
Chris Cooper (18:33):
And you know, in theory that’s a great model, but in practice it just doesn’t work. That’s not what happens. When a gym closes, its clients, 30% of them go to another gym and the rest of them stop working out. Its coaches, you know, 20% of them might go work somewhere else and the rest leave the industry. And most gym owners of failing gyms leave the industry, too. They think that it’s a problem with the industry and not just with their own entrepreneurial skill set. And so if we really want to expand the industry and be the tip of the spear and expand our impact and save more lives, we’re actually best to focus on the top thousand gyms and just keep making them better so that they can create careers for other passionate coaches. They can create opportunities for membership for other passionate clients and they can replicate the best model over and over again instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Chris Cooper (19:27):
So it is in line with our vision. Finally, another great reason—and this might apply to you, too—is that if we cap it a thousand, we don’t have to expand our management layer. So every time your gym hits like a scale point, you have to expand your management layer. When Two-Brain hit a hundred clients, we had to hire a head trainer and somebody that’s in charge of quality control and an admin. So that meant that then we had to add another 20 clients to get back to our level of profitability. And that happened again at 500 clients and at a thousand clients. We have this amazing team of about 70 staff worldwide. About 55 of those people are mentors, and we have an amazing admin staff of client support and ops, and our app developers and our bookkeeping staff. If I expand beyond a thousand, I’m gonna have to start expanding those roles.
Chris Cooper (20:19):
And the staff that we have right now is so good at their jobs, they’re so amazing, they’re so perfect, that adding one more person into the mix is just something that I don’t wanna do. And so I would rather keep delivering a 10-outta-10 experience for our clients with the staff that we have now instead of introducing new staff and training them up. We’re really rocking right now. So what does a cap actually mean? This is the last question. A cap doesn’t mean that we’re putting up a fence around Two-Brain and we’re not taking any new clients. Every single month through natural causes we open up spaces for about 20 more people. Sometimes we’re ascending people into our Tinker-level program. Sometimes we’re graduating people into our alumni path, and sometimes we’re just not a perfect fit. So that means we have about 20 seats available per month, where we will welcome gyms who are ready for mentorship, no matter where they’re coming from. Even if they haven’t opened yet and they want the best possible path, we will welcome them with full focus and attention.
Chris Cooper (21:21):
We’ll welcome them with one-on-one mentorship and cutting-edge technology and everything that they need and nothing that they don’t need. We’ll welcome them without distraction. We’ll welcome them with our full attention, full heart, full level of care because we have this cap in place. I’m explaining this because I want you to understand that there is value in capping your service, that unlimited growth doesn’t mean unlimited upside or unlimited profits or unlimited fun for you, the entrepreneur, most of the time. It just means that you’re trying to satisfy your ego. Trust me, at a thousand clients, my heart is full, my life is full, and I am absolutely thrilled to be working with a thousand of the top gyms in the world. I’m Chris Cooper, this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thanks for listening. If you wanna chat more or ask more questions about this or anything to do with gym ownership, you can join our Gym Owners United Group. It’s free. It’s on Facebook, where you’re already spending five hours of your day. Just go to gymownersunited.com and you’ll be directed. Thank you for your service.
The post The Client Cap: Why We’ve Got One and Why It Might Improve Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 7, 2023
How to Become the Best Gym in Town
In this series, I’ve been writing about the measurable value of being the best gym owner in town.
In the first post, I talked about the effect being the best has on retention—you’ll keep people longer and get the best clients to come back.
In the second, I talked about how being the best causes ascension—some clients will start elsewhere and then ascend to your top-shelf gym when they’re ready.
But what does “the best” really mean? After all, it’s a subjective term.
“The best” means offering optimal value to your ideal client.
My gym isn’t the best gym for those seeking to compete in CrossFit.
It is the best gym for those who want hands-on coaching that will help them get fitter faster.
My gym isn’t the best for air-conditioned comfort.
It is the best for those who want to work out with friends.
My gym is not the best for mirrors or new machinery.
It is the best for professionals who need flexible scheduling.
The beautiful part about having multiple gyms in town? We can all fit as long as each one is “the best” at something. That means we have a “best gym for cyclists,” a “best gym for lawyers on lunch breaks,” a “best gym for people who only want to pay $19 per month,” and a “best gym for great coaching” (mine).
And you can niche down further: You could be the best CrossFit gym for fat loss, or the best Pilates gym for sports performance or the best kickboxing gym for fun.
The key is to know your niche and be the best gym for the people in that niche.
Becoming the Best
Knowing your niche is the first non-negotiable building block of “best.”
The second building block is consistency. Your business can’t just be “the best” when you’re around. It has to be “the best”—at a consistent level—every hour you’re open, regardless of who is there or what’s going on.
The third building block is marketing. To be the best, you have to attract the right people. I have around 150 clients at Catalyst now, but over the years I’ve probably burned through 10 times that many. Some were bad fits and some should never have been allowed in. Most of them I turned off because I was too distracted to give them the service they wanted to buy. If you know your niche and market to attract the right people, you’ll keep clients longer.
The fourth building block is sales: To be the best, you must be able to clearly explain how you’re the best option for the person in the sales office with you.
The fifth building block is profitability: To be the best, you have to be around long enough for people to find you, filter you, and maybe even leave and come back. This is why being the best is 10x better than coming in second. The compounding factor of time produces increasingly large rewards. Play the long game and outlast everyone: If you can just keep going and deliver the best product to your best clients, you’ll stop worrying about competition—because you won’t have any.
You don’t need a monopoly in your town.
You just need to be the best gym for the right people.
The post How to Become the Best Gym in Town appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 6, 2023
Being the Best: Longstanding Lighthouses of Excellence
In this series, I’m taking about the measurable value of being the best gym in town.
Sure, it’s awesome to think you’re the best: You get a lot of pride from it. But actually being the best carries real, measurable value.
Today, I want to introduce a new concept: ascension.
When you’re the best, you will attract the best clients from other gyms.
You won’t attract all the clients, but the best will find their way to you. That means you can actually view competitors as your “feeder system.”
When a new gym opens down the street, it might be stressful. But if you’re the best, the gym’s presence can benefit you. After owning a gym for 18 years, I’ve seen this happen many times:
1. New gym opens to great fanfare. Existing gym owner is terrified to have another CrossFit or HIIT or similar gym on the block.
2. The new gym attracts different types of people to “try” the method. For whatever reason, the new equipment or different branding draws people.
3. After trying the method, the best clients will seek to upgrade their experience by finding the best gym.
I’ve seen this dozens of times in my gym, but it’s also so common in business coaching that a similar sequence is actually part of our plan at Two-Brain Business: Sometimes a gym owner signs up with a different coach or mentor for a year and then ascends to Two-Brain. We even have a popular hashtag in our groups: #bestfindsbest.
Sometimes clients are attracted to novelty. Sometimes your future best clients aren’t ready to be your best clients yet. Sometimes they need to try the “cheap version” before they go all in on the best version. But if you’re the best, they’ll eventually upgrade to you.
Many clients at my gym, Catalyst, started somewhere else but are now longstanding members of our community.
Once again, time plays a huge factor. People can’t ascend to your business if it’s clearly a flash-in-the-pan endeavor.
But if you’re a lighthouse of excellence in your town for years, you can expect the top clients to ask you for direction at some point.
The post Being the Best: Longstanding Lighthouses of Excellence appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 5, 2023
Why It’s 10 Times Better to Be the Best Gym in Town
Chris Cooper (00:00):
Does being the best gym in town really matter or does it all really come down to who’s the best at marketing and selling? I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today I’m gonna tell you why being the best gym has exponential value over being second best. I’m gonna give you three different reasons why that’s true and why you should work hard to have the best gym. Being the best of course sounds great, right? It pleases our ego. We wanna be the one to say “yeah, we got the best gym in town” and really mean it, really believe it. But the truth is that it’s worth pursuing being the best gym. I don’t just mean having the most knowledge or seeking the most certified trainers but actually running the best business. And there are several reasons why. The first is exponential value. The second is ascension value.
Chris Cooper (00:49):
And the third is that being the best at what matters matters more than anything else. Alright, so here we go. Let’s start with the exponential value of being the best gym over the second best gym. Exponential growth means that you’re no longer getting one client at a time. That’s incremental growth. Exponential growth means that the clients that you have refer more clients in. Okay? Incremental growth. You’re advertising, you’re bringing one person through the funnel, you’re meeting with them, you’re signing them up. You’re plus one. Exponential growth: You’re bringing a client in, they love the program. That’s plus one. They love it so much they’re recruiting other people. That’s plus two, plus three—without your direct involvement, without putting each one of those people through their own funnel. That is exponential growth. And if you’re the best gym, you will get exponential growth because being the best has compounding value over time.
Chris Cooper (01:46):
Here’s why: Your best clients will stick around longer. Your best clients will. Not every client will stick around longer. Some clients are gonna chase price, convenience, different flavor or whatever. But your best clients will stick around longer, and they are the ones who bring you the next best clients, who will stick around longer, right? The people who don’t have a problem affording your service, the people who are generally just happy in life, the people who are making great progress and happy with their progress, those are the people who are going to bring you others who can afford it, who are generally happy in life, who aren’t complainers, who are just happy to make consistent progress, right? Best finds best. So your best clients will stay. That’s the first way that this compounds. The second is that some of your clients who leave will come back if you are the best.
Chris Cooper (02:35):
This has happened to me so many times: Somebody has been a client at Catalyst, at my gym, for like three years, and they’re like, “’You know what? I like this, but I’m ready to see what else is out there.” We all find that sometimes, right? Like there’s a meme about it. And so they go away, and they do personal training, and two or three months later, I get this call: “Coop. It’s not the same, man. Like, what’s it take to come back?” And I say, “All it takes is you showing up on Monday. We’ll pick a package and you’ll be in the group in three minutes. No problem.” So when you are the best, people will come back. When you’re not the best, the same thing will happen. People will be in your gym for three years, whatever: “This is good, but I’m gonna see what’s out there.”
Chris Cooper (03:15):
And then they go to someplace better—and “this is better. Why would I ever go back?” And, even worse, if they’ve got a lot of friends at your gym and now they’re getting a better experience, they’re probably gonna tell those other people, okay? So being the best has compounding value. It has exponential value because your best clients will stay longer and the clients who leave will come back. The other thing is that some clients who come into your service, they don’t sign up. They’re just not ready to be your best clients yet. They haven’t started their fitness track. They need to try some other things. They need to ascend to you, which is my second point. Okay? So the second reason that it’s so important to be the best—it’s 10 times better to be the best than to be second best—is ascension value.
Chris Cooper (04:04):
Okay? So what happens with ascension value is that all the other gyms in town, they recruit people, they introduce people to fitness. The people fall in love with fitness. And then those people who are now committed to the fitness path, they wanna find the best fitness experience. So if there’s five CrossFit gyms in your town and there’s a low-priced option, then that’s maybe a good intro option for a lot of people. You know: “I don’t know if I’m gonna like CrossFit. I’m gonna go to this gym. I’m gonna try it out. It’s 90 bucks a month. The other guys are one 50.” And so they go to that gym and maybe they’re not onboarded very well. Maybe, you know, they don’t get a lot of attention in class, but they still really like CrossFit. And they get hooked, and they do the Open and they watch the CrossFit Games, and then they hear about another CrossFit gym in town where everybody’s having an amazing experience, and they say, “Hey, I deserve that. I’ve been doing CrossFit for two years now. I should see what else is out there.” And then they come to your gym if you’re the best. And they stay there because if you are the best, everybody else will ascend their clients to you. Remember what I said: Your future best clients might not be your best clients right now. That’s because they just haven’t ascended up to you yet. They haven’t convinced themselves that they love it enough to deserve going to the best. And so ascension value is something that you gain only by being the best. Nobody seeks out the second-best baseball training gym in town, okay? Nobody seeks out the second-best yoga experience. If somebody’s passionate, they want the best experience, and those are the people that you want the most. Okay? So the good gyms eventually ascend people to you when they are ready to be your best client and they’re already convinced about the product that you’re selling.
Chris Cooper (05:55):
The next reason why it’s so important to be the best is that you have to be the best at what actually matters. Okay? So subjectively, we all have our favorites. And my favorite might be different from yours, right? Like, I don’t like pineapple on a pizza. I don’t like fruit and a salad. You might like both of those things, and that’s fine, right? We can still be friends. It just means that you wanna be the best to the people that you care the most about. You want them to say, “Chris is the best. Catalyst is the best gym. There are always going to be people who prefer something else. The key is that you wanna be the best to the best clients. The best must find the best. So if you wanna serve people who are my demographic—45 to 50 years old-ish, two growing kids, financially stable, you know, pretty happy in life, doesn’t need to be doing competitions—then you might not be the best fit for somebody who’s 20 years old and looking to pick up the opposite sex at the gym for the weekend. And maybe they’ll do a throwdown three times a year, four times a year, right? Maybe they’re going to really care about the programming. Like those people are not the best for you. So the most important thing is that you are the best for the clients that you want. Okay? Here’s my recap: It is exponentially valuable to be the best for three reasons. Number 1, the exponential value of having the best people stay and other people come back. Number 2, the ascension value of all the other gyms eventually just building their clients up to love your service and them coming to you. And then third, subjective, you are the best to the best demographic. Which means that if I am a 45-year-old dude, I’m fairly well off, and my wife and I go to your gym but we notice everybody else is 20 and that gym over there has a bunch of 45-year-old people who are, you know, financially stable, they’re into families, they’re not into partying, and swiping right all weekend, like we’re probably gonna go to that other gym, right? You wanna be the best for the people that who fit you—the best for your target demographic. Look, if you’re gonna do one thing after this, it’s figure out who you wanna be the best gym for. Do the “pumpkin-plan exercise.” Figure out who your best clients are. Take them out one by one for coffee. Ask them what brought them to your gym. Ask them what turned them off about other gyms. Ask them what their biggest challenges outside the gym are and work to actually solve that with them. When you do that, you will decide who your best clients are. You’ll figure out how to ascend other people like those best clients to you, and you’ll figure out how to get the clients back that you maybe blew it with earlier. I hope that helps. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’d love to have you in our free Facebook group. It’s called Gym Owners United. There are almost 7,000 of us in there—the fitness industry’s best people. And you can join it for free. I’m in there. I do webinars. I give out free tips. We have discussions about this stuff all the time. Gymownersunited.com. Hope to see you in there!
The post Why It’s 10 Times Better to Be the Best Gym in Town appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
Does Being the Best Gym Owner Really Matter?
Here’s a myth we all want to believe: If we’re the best coach in town, we’ll win.
I remember telling my partners “I’m gonna put all of these other guys out of business. They don’t know anything about training!”
But I was wrong: Reading scientific journals, collecting old Soviet texts and arguing with other coaches online didn’t grow my business.
When I found CrossFit, I loved the lure of this line contained in the “Level 1 Training Guide”: “It becomes obvious that the most effective business plan comes from achieving excellence and letting the market bring the money to you.” I was thrilled because I thought the best trainers would naturally attract more clients.
But I later realized the most popular fitness coaches of all time are people like Richard Simmons, Jillian Michaels and Tony Little. I can’t find a single Ph.D. in the bunch. Being a good trainer is necessary, but insufficient, to making a good living in the field.
However, a good coach who is the best business owner can build a gym worth 10 times more than a gym built by a semi-good owner.
In this series, I’m going to tell you why being the best business owner matters and how the best in the world actually perform exponentially better than those around them.
Business Excellence and Retention
Let’s start with how being the best affects retention.
If you’re clearly, obviously the best gym, your clients will be unlikely to leave. In fact, having your clients visit other gyms—for competitions, fundraisers, etc.—will actually improve your gym’s retention because they won’t be tempted to “see what else is out there.”
Novelty can influence people, and sometimes a client can be lured away by something different just because it’s different.
But if you’re the best, and they know it, they’ll usually stay. Novelty just doesn’t hold a candle to true quality. Example: Those cool, new shoes that fall apart right away aren’t going to be popular for long.
If you’re the best, the clients who do leave will usually come back. And these are often the best clients to have: They’ve seen that the grass ain’t greener on the other side. They’ve satisfied their natural curiosity, and now they’re all in on your program—because they know from experience that it’s the best.
The compounding value of time makes being the best exponentially more important. If you’re the best, you’ll be open long enough for clients to leave and come back or to start somewhere else and ascend to you. You’ll even gain clients when lesser gyms close.
As Dave Tate told me in 2016, “A lot of business is just attrition—if you’re still around in three years, you’ll win because everyone else will be gone.”
Of course, when you’re the best, some clients just won’t be ready for you yet. I’ll talk about that in the next post. And then I’ll talk about what being “the best” really means.
The post Does Being the Best Gym Owner Really Matter? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 2, 2023
The Simple Path to $86,000 as a Coach or $107,000 as a Gym Owner
Gym owners and coaches, I’m going to give you a career path that didn’t exist in the fitness industry five years ago.
A coach can get on this path in about six weeks and start earning the kind of money that turns a job into a career.
For gym owners, this path will add revenue to businesses and help them retain valuable staff members.
Here we go.
The Problem
If you’ve spent any time working in the fitness world, you know all about a major problem: You can only coach so many hours before you burn out, and, in many cases, the money earned in those hours isn’t enough.
Example: A young coach powers through eight hours of group classes at $20 or $25 a class. Push that out to a year and the coach might earn about $40,000-$50,000 for 2,000 hours of coaching. You can decide if that’s enough to support a family.
But here’s a harsh reality: No coach can sustain the required energy for eight hours a day. Quality of coaching declines, and eventually a skilled but burned-out and underpaid trainer leaves the industry to try and make more money in another field.
Even personal trainers burn out this way. Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper once coached 13 hours straight only to find himself exhausted and still unable to pay his bills.
Read on for a solution.
Semi-Private Training and Nutrition Coaching
Here are two services coaches and gym owners can offer to generate revenue and create careers:
Semi-Private Training
A coach leads a group of up to four clients through personalized workout programs designed to help them accomplish goals. They are not doing variations of the same workout. A skilled, well-prepared coach divides attention just as a talented server at a restaurant ensures guests at four tables all get exactly what they need when they need it.
Clients pay slightly less than they would for one-on-one coaching, which means they can train more often. A well-mentored gym owner takes a percentage of gross revenue—55 is a good number—to cover fixed costs and profit, and the coach is paid the other 44 percent of the gross.
Habits-Based Nutrition Coaching
A nutrition coach with a general credential helps clients create healthy habits that allow them to accomplish body-composition goals. The coaching can be done completely online.
Clients might pay about $225 a month for a service like this. In an ideal structure, the coach takes about $100 (44 percent), and the gym owner takes about $125 per client per month (55 percent). Nutrition coaching can be done quickly, so coaches can effectively serve many clients without accumulating huge hours.
Sample Career Profile
Here’s a general plan you might explore:
The money:
Gym owner’s cut:
Keep in mind:
How Do You Make It Happen?
The exact details of this plan are laid out in the media below by Two-Brain mentors Brian Bott and Cynthia Fotti.
Both teach gym owners exactly how to get these programs in place at their gyms to generate revenue and create great careers for staff.
Semi-Private Training
Podcast: “How Coaches Can Earn $80 or More Per Hour”
Habits-Based Nutrition Coaching
Podcast: “How to Launch a Nutrition Program in 6 Weeks”
Go Further
A final note: This is just the free content Two-Brain puts out. It can help you dramatically increase profitability at your gym. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Clients get even more: One-on-one guidance, constant support, plug-and-play resources, checklists and implementation plans, customizable document templates, marketing strategies and ad campaigns, stock photos, hiring plans and much more.
To find out more about all that, click here.
The post The Simple Path to $86,000 as a Coach or $107,000 as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
