Chris Cooper's Blog, page 69

How This Gym Owner Generated $57,000 in Monthly Revenue With No Ad Spend

Mike Warkentin (00:00):
Our revenue leaderboards at Two-Brain are always sick. In April, the Top 10, everyone on the leaderboard was over US$50,000. The Number 1 gym: over $80,000. These are consistent numbers too, not just outlier months. One of our leaderboarders is here on the show, and he’s gonna tell you exactly how we earned a spot on the Top 10 leaderboard. Don’t go anywhere—you need to hear this show. Welcome to “Run a Profitable Gym.” My name is Mike Warkentin. I believe that you can listen to the guests on this show every week and measurably, dramatically improve your gym business. So don’t forget to subscribe. I don’t want you to miss a single show or any of the great guests that I have upcoming. Now on to Tommy Alfinito. He owns Hygge Fitness in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey. Because he’s so good at running a gym, he actually has time to get into real estate. He started a cool project called Wildfether Distillery. But we’re here to talk gym business, not whiskey, although we’ll get to that a different show. So let’s start digging for details so you can bump up your revenue. Tommy, welcome to the show.

Tommy Alfinito (00:57):
Thanks for having me.

Mike Warkentin (00:58):
I Can’t wait to get into this. I’m gonna get right to the blunt question so our listeners get the answer right away: What’s the Number 1 thing that helps you generate more than $50,000 in revenue every month?

Tommy Alfinito (01:08):
Yeah, so as I was like getting prepared for this podcast, I kind of went back and was thinking through all the different stages. So I’ve had the gym for 13 years, and I like wrote out each stage and what we did that really like grew revenue. And we can definitely get into that if you think it’ll be interesting. But as I looked at everything, I kind of saw an overarching theme, and that was really just having this laser focus on growing one thing. And then within that, like knowing who we’re for and who we’re trying to get ahold of and kind of putting that out into the world so those people know like, “Oh, this is the place. I’m that person. This is the place to go.” Yeah, so that was kind of like, I think the big lessons that I even took away. I don’t know if I was super aware until I started looking at those stages.

Mike Warkentin (01:54):
So laser focus. Meaning like when I started a gym, I tried to do all the things. So laser focus on just growing certain aspects of the business—focusing on this, call it a 90-day sprint or whatever, crush that thing, then move on to the next thing. Rather than spinning 50 plates at once, you’re spinning a few plates really well, making sure they keep spinning and then moving on. And what I heard from you there is also that you’ve applied that focus to your market. Instead of trying to find every single client, which is what I did, you’re trying to find the best clients who will pay you high-value money and stay for a long time. Is that right?

Tommy Alfinito (02:26):
Yeah, that’s right. And like when I was looking through my different stages, my first stage, like when we first opened, we just offered group class. So that was all we offered was group training. So it’s like I, you know, was very green in business. I probably had no idea that that was a good thing. But my business was just—we had one thing to sell. If you walked in the door, you could come into group training. And we, early on we were very focused on people who were competitive and wanted to compete or wanted to be in that group. So like everything we put out was for that group and we could, like I said, one thing when you came in. So we didn’t have the distractions of trying to grow group and PT and a nutrition program at the same time. It was just like you walked in the door: “Here’s what we offer. This is exactly who we’re for.” And if you were that person, you were like, “Sign me up.”

Mike Warkentin (03:13):
That’s almost a good thing in the sense that a lot of gym owners—Chris Cooper’s written about this—they feel pressured to do lots of things. Like “I should expand or run this program, this program, this program.” I was definitely guilty of putting into place some programs I probably didn’t need to. There’s nothing wrong with starting one thing really strong, making it excellent and then cautiously expanding outside that—say adding a nutrition program next, getting that solidified, then adding a kids program, maybe having only three or four really strong revenue streams instead of trying to do 60 different things. Right? Like that was a mistake I made. But you seemed to avoid the temptation.

Tommy Alfinito (03:46):
Yeah, and we’ve added more stuff over time. But it’s like you can only grow one of those things. And even most recently, like my GM is really organized, and one of the things she focused on was adding specialty classes, and she’s been able to add a few thousand dollars of revenue. But during that time, our group, we figured out that past 220 people, I’ll start the cap. It’s too many for us. So we hit the 220 number, and then we shifted our focus to specialties for a year, and it went really well. But our group actually just kind of slowly dropped over that year because we could only focus on one thing. That’s really what we’re finding. So the specialties grew and became this whole new revenue stream for us, which was great. And then like six months ago we had to turn all of our focus back to group to get us back up to kinda like our max number. And then now we’re seeing that grow really quickly. The past three months, the group has been growing again. So it’s just kind of funny. It’s like where you shine that beam on is really where the growth can happen for us.

Mike Warkentin (04:49):
So it’s focus, and it’s also careful expansion from a position of stability and power rather than just frantic movement. And, listeners, if you’re having trouble with this, ‘cause it’s very common, I struggle with this, a mentor can help. A mentor will tell you what to do when and how to do it exactly. That’s part of the point of our mentorship program. Tell me, you’ve given us some hints here, but gimme the 60-second rundown of your gym. What exactly you do there? How much space you got? What staff? Gimme that whole thing.

Tommy Alfinito (05:14):
Yeah, so we have we have a lot of space. We have 12,500 square feet. And it’s one of those things like we probably have more than we need. But we definitely utilize it all. So with the space, we have basically have three spaces. So in our busy times, we’ll be running three classes. We’ll be running like a 5 a.m. a 5:30 a.m., and then at night we’ll run a kids class or have personal training in there. So we do use all the space. But yeah, so 12,500 square feet. Gym’s been around for 13 years. We’ve been in this space for 10 years.

Mike Warkentin (05:47):
Nice. You’ve got roots.

Tommy Alfinito (05:49):
Yeah. And then for our staff we have five full-timers. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (05:55):
And you did this right outta college, am I right?

Tommy Alfinito (05:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to school for finance, and I did an internship my junior year and I was like—I think I was just having too much fun. I never really thought about what I wanted to do, and I just like, “I’ll do business.” And then, like, all right, pick a concentration the next year. And I’m like, “Finance sounds good.” And then I did the job, and I can see why people love the job. But I was like, “It’s not for me.” So I’ll never forget, I called my mom and I was like, “I should have done exercise science or something. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t wanna do finance.” And my mom was my biggest supporter. She was like she was like, “Okay.” She’s like, “Well, change your major.” I was like, “I’m gonna graduate in a year. I don’t wanna go to school for longer. I’m just gonna open a gym.” And she was like, “All right, let’s do it.” So I graduated in December, and I had signed lease already, and we opened in January.

Mike Warkentin (06:45):
That’s really cool. And you know what? I bet that finance training probably helps you quite a bit because I think some people who have ex.-phys. training or anything like that, they struggle mightily with the business side even though they’re good coaches. But they’ve got a gym and they just wanna coach, not run the business. So maybe you did it the right way, and maybe a lot of us did it the wrong way by focusing on coaching credentials when we should have learned about business. But that’s a topic for another show. I wanna ask you this: Most people, when we talk about revenue, the classic thing is they think “more clients, how do I get more clients? How do I fill my gym?” But maybe they should be focusing on like retention and referrals first. And I know that you did an interview before this, and I read some of the stuff that you said. So talk to me about retention and referrals and how they affect your revenue number, which is amazing.

Tommy Alfinito (07:26):
Yeah. So, like I said, we recently re-put the focus on growing our group training. For us, when we’re really focused on giving the best class experience and the best service, that seems to just translate into growth for us more than anything else. Even like marketing or ads or things like that. So there’s, I think there’s two parts to that. The first thing was we had a lot of turnover. So we had the same coaches—we had four coaches that were here for five-plus years. And then in the last year we had three of them turn over and just leave for different reasons. So with that, we brought in new coaches, and it was kind of like a learning thing. Cause I’m not as involved in the business anymore. So before all my coaches learned from me, and then I’m not there now. And so I was having a hard time with this communication of me to my GM to the coaches and like getting them all to do it the way that we want it done. So I came up with this kind of like acronym thing, and it’s “3-2-1 to a perfect class.” And so the reason I have the gym is ‘cause I think personal connections are like the key to happiness. So I think our personal human connections with each other are what make us feel fulfilled. So that’s really what we try to do at the gym. So we created the 3-2-1 to highlight that. Why? And it’s basically every single class we want—oh my gosh, now I’m gonna blank on it as I have to say it. So every single class we want you to check in with three members by name. Right? Every single in every class, you should have two touchpoints with every single person in class. And then you should create one personal connection between two members in class. And that’s the biggest change that we did. And like just kind of again creating that focus on what we want the experience to be. And then everything kind of started growing again from there.

Mike Warkentin (09:25):
So the interesting part about that is that a lot of coaches will listen to this or gym owners will say, “Yeah, you should connect with your clients. No big deal. Tell me more.” But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re systemizing excellence and saying, “Here is exactly what I want you as a coach to do in this hour to connect with clients. Here is the standard of service.” And I’ve said it on the show a hundred times, and I’ll keep saying it a hundred more: systems equal success in the gym business. If you don’t have systems and you don’t have systemized procedures to govern your stuff, it’s not gonna work the way you want it to. And, Tommy, you would not be able to run a distillery and invest in real estate if you had to be in your gym trying to make this happen without systems. So, like, by laying this stuff out—and I love the 3-2-1 to a perfect class–it actually tells your coaches exactly what a 10 out of 10 is. How long did it take you to come up with systemizing and getting these things in place? Was that a concept that was new to you?

Tommy Alfinito (10:15):
I mean, I would say like it’s a concept that I struggle with, and I’m still learning a lot. It’s like forced learning now. Cause I only, I meet up with—I have a leadership team of the head coach and a GM, and I meet up with them once a week for an hour. And that’s kind of like, that’s my input into the gym. So it was just like a learning—like I was saying, I’m talking with them, but the classes aren’t exactly how I want them to run. So it’s like, yeah, I don’t know. It’s trial by fire. Right? And I think that’s how a lot of us learn, and it’s really simple. I like simplicity. That’s kind of like what—I like simplicity. I like to be focused. I like businesses that are kind of focused.

Tommy Alfinito (10:52):
But it’s also—I think the simplicity isn’t really the key. It’s that now that we have this made so like every week when we meet up we say, “Okay, we’re gonna focus on this portion of the 3-2-1. And then when they run the meeting with the team, that’s a 10-minute portion of the meeting. It’s talking about “all right, how are we doing with the two touchpoints? And is anyone having trouble or does anyone have anything that’s been successful?” And so like I think the actual magic is just in being really, really repetitive about it. Which I know as a business owner, all of us, like, that sounds so boring, but that’s what it takes. It’s just like, “Okay, we have this thing now. We don’t need to mess with it. It’s perfect. We just need to continually talk about it and continually embrace it.”

Mike Warkentin (11:36):
I’ll give you two incredible things that you can take from this podcast. The first is focus on doing one thing to grow your business measurably every day, and do it the very first thing. I’ve stolen this from Chris Cooper. Do something to grow your business every day. That could be emailing five members and saying, “How are you?” Something simple like that, that will have a measurable effect on your business. That is retention. That is growth because you’re gonna keep those people for longer. The other thing, if you’re struggling, systemize something, anything in your business, pick anything that you can find, even your cleaning, and write down an SOP for it. Start there and then systemize your entire business. But don’t get overwhelmed. Start with one simple thing. Those are two things you can do today. And Tommy, you said something really interesting about personal connections. Now in the digital world, I mean, I’m talking to you over Zoom. Everybody’s always looking down at their cell phones and not paying attention to anyone anymore. You’re talking about personal connections in a coaching business. Super important. How do you use that for retention and referrals to get people in? Because we know once we have a good client, we want their friends.

Tommy Alfinito (12:37):
Yeah. For retention, I think it’s really obvious: That’s the “1” in our 3-2-1. It’s creating those connections. So like we want them to come in more so because of the people. They’re excited to see the people and it’s their friends or things like that. More so than the workouts. Like we know that we all have those weeks where we just don’t wanna work out. But then also we try to create a referral culture. So I think we start by saying, “This is who we’re for,” being really clear about that. And then we hope that if we can give these people amazing service, they’ll be like, “Oh, I have someone in my life that would really love it here.” So I think for our referral culture, it starts by being super clear to everybody about what kind of person belongs at the gym. And then from there we just try to highlight that. So highlight that. That’s what people here do is they tell other people like them that would love it here to come here. And it’s really simple stuff. It’s as simple as just like when we do get referrals, the two biggest things we do is, the first, we try to get a picture of them together in a class. And then we just put it in Facebook—kind of putting it up on social media, just thanking them and highlighting that people that like it here bring in friends that would like it here. And then the other thing is we do the surprise and delight. So my GM has up to a hundred dollars that she can spend for the person that did the referring. And it’s supposed to be something meaningful. So we, I tell her, “I don’t care if it’s a $20 gift or it’s a hundred-dollar gift. I just want it to be the right one.” And so a trick that we got that I stole from my friend Chris Plentus is like, we’ll just go through their Instagram, scroll through, and find what their hobbies, what their likes are and then write a nice note thanking them and give them a gift that will be meaningful to them.

Mike Warkentin (14:21):
You can’t see it here, but on the couch behind me, I literally have a pillow with a picture of my dog’s face on it. It was given to me by John Briggs, who wrote “Profit First for Microgyms” because I gave him a little bit of assistance with something. And it was exactly that principle. I thought, “This was the coolest gift I had been given in a very long time.” So that works. Did you notice when you started focusing on building a referral culture, did you notice an actual increase in referrals? And I mean this because a lot of gym owners just say “referrals happen.” Did you notice a change when you focused on it?

Tommy Alfinito (14:50):
Yes. And the first time I focused on it was like six years ago, and we did some really cheesy things. Like it was before Golden State used the whole strength-in-numbers thing. So we made a whole board that we got printed at a print shop that said “strength in numbers.” And we actually, when people would refer, people would put their name and put the person they referred on the thing. And it worked. I didn’t love it, but it worked, and it felt a little more salesy, like up front. But it worked, and I think it didn’t work because people wanted the recognition. It just worked because we were like, when I say “creating a referral culture,” we were just telling people “we want you to bring in your friends” in a very obvious and in-your-face way. So we don’t do that now. I think we’re a little more tactful about it, but it’s still the same principle

Mike Warkentin (15:36):
Point being referrals will not just happen. They might happen from time to time, but they’re not gonna happen at a consistent rate if you don’t make them happen. So you can definitely put some stuff in place. Tommy’s got a great thing—building a referral culture. I’m gonna put a link in the show notes to Chris Cooper’s article called “Building a Referral Culture.” It has a lot of great things in there to help you, without sounding cheesy, get people in the door. And a lot of it is from the “help first” principle of saying, “How do I help your husband, wife, whatever with this fitness problem? I have a solution. Do they need help?” Simple stuff like that. That’s not marketing; it’s just helping. Help first is the concept. We’ll put a link in the show notes for you. Now tell me, the next thing, average revenue per member. So we’ve talked about retention and we’ve talked about referrals. How does average revenue per member go into your revenue score?

Tommy Alfinito (16:25):
Yeah, our business has changed a ton. Like I said, we’ve been around for 13 years. Like 10 years ago, seven to 10 years ago, we actually had about 330 to 350 members, and we had $112 ARM. So it was like such a different business. And what’s crazy is we would get to 350 and then we would always, every time, we’d lose like 30, 40 people really quickly. We’d drop down to 310, and then we’d go back up to 350, and then we’d lose ’em again. And I realized, like at the time, there were some nights we were running three actual group adult classes at once. It was chaos. And I realized like if I really wanted to have a gym of 350-plus people, I would’ve had to fundamentally change the whole business. Like add way more team, more space, everything. So thankfully I didn’t do that, and we started to kind of focus more on that ARM number. And now for us, like I said, 220 is about the max members we can handle in group. Like right now we’re close to that number again. Classes are starting to cap, and we don’t wanna go crazy adding classes. And then we have added more programs. So after COVID we added a personal-training program that we grew. So we went from $0 to $10,000 a month in PT pretty quickly, and that kind of was really nice. And then a kids program. And then we added, like I said, the specialties recently. So now our ARM is over $200. Oh, so very different business.

Mike Warkentin (17:58):
So I’m not a math whiz, but you had 310 members or 320 members at $112 I think you said, and now you’ve got about 220 at over $200 and you’re probably doing more revenue now. Am I right?

Tommy Alfinito (18:10):
Yeah. yeah, I’d actually say what’s interesting is we’re doing more revenue, but it’s not like a crazy drastic change in revenue for us. This has always kinda been like our sweet spot for revenue. It’s just we can keep everyone happy, and our retention is great. Like so we have about 250 members. That’s including our personal training. And like I know last month we had five cancels. So like we’re able to actually have really good interaction, really good retention versus like that business model I said before where a normal month would be 20, 25 cancels.

Mike Warkentin (18:47):
So then I’m gonna guess that even if your retention was equal from the 330 days to now, I bet your expenses and your stress are probably reduced because you don’t need as many classes. You don’t need as many coaches. You don’t need as much toilet paper. You don’t need as much of everything. Right? Like, am I right on that? Your expenses and probably your profitability’s better?

Tommy Alfinito (19:07):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And if we’re building a business built on personal connections, having like a revolving door of—like I said, we were signing up 30 people a month and then like 28 were leaving in a month. So we were plus two. But if it’s about personal connections, we were not creating that. We were creating more of this revolving door of people, and there’s 350 people moving around. Like at, at one time we could have like 70 people in three classes, and it was just no personal connections happening there. It’s like herding cats at that point.

Mike Warkentin (19:38):
If you intake 30, lose 28, you’re plus two, but you’re minus all the time it took to onboard those people, find those people, sell to those people, market to those people. That’s a ton of costs in actual dollar value if you’re marketing and it’s a ton of costs in staff time. And then your retention suffers. So if your retention is better, your length of engagement, which is a measurable, improvable metric, if that’s better, your marketing costs will go down and your staffing costs will go down because you’re keeping better people longer rather than struggling to find people. And that’s less stress. Like I would rather have a hundred $200 clients than 200 $100 clients. I don’t know if there’s anyone that would make the opposite trade, do you?

Tommy Alfinito (20:15):
No, I agree. Yeah. It’s so many more headaches. And you think to get to that number, you have to get farther away from like who you’re for. So then you have this mismatch. You have a lot more friction. People that are complaining or unhappy. Yeah. I think you nailed it, like the stress component. And just like the enjoyment of the business that you are running and building is just so much higher.

Mike Warkentin (20:36):
It’s hard to see as a newer gym owner, but if you can focus in on 150 to 200 of the right people and keep them for a period of years at a rate of $250 or whatever, like name your number in there—but not $25—if you can do that, you can be a very successful gym owner. You can make a hundred thousand dollars a year or more. And you can create an incredible business that creates careers for people. Like we have the data on this. The Two-Brain business model shows that all this works. Tommy’s living proof. He’s now ascended to what we call the Tinker Stage, where he’s now working an hour a week or an hour a month, whatever you said, in your gym—very little—telling a GM “here’s how it needs to go. Do that.” You’re the CEO, and now you’re doing other projects on the side. We won’t get into the Tinker-level stuff, but it’s an exciting world when you get a gym that’s systematized, focused and runs properly. So last thing I’ll ask you, Tommy, is when you do need members, how do you find them? Because everyone’s gonna wanna say, “No, look, you’ve got tons of revenue. How do I get more members?” What do you do besides referrals?

Tommy Alfinito (21:36):
Yeah, so like I said, the past few months we’ve really focused on group, and it’s been going great. So I know this might go against some of like the trends normally, but we really don’t do ads. We don’t do marketing, we don’t do any of that stuff. So when it becomes time for us, there’s really like three “wells” that we can go to. The first one is that we go to is old members. So we’ve been around for 13 years. So we have this whole list of people that either were members or expressed interest that didn’t sign up or just filled out their information and never came in. So that’s a big one for us. And I would actually say like we actually return six to eight old members a month.

Mike Warkentin (22:18):
Wow! No marketing cost to that other than email or text probably.

Tommy Alfinito (22:22):
Yeah. And a couple things we do with that is we make it really easy to cancel. And then we check in with them at times, and we’ll just email people and just be like, “Hey, how’s it going?” Like, cause we generally care about ’em. Like we’re not emailing them and saying like, “Hey, do you miss working out?” Or just email. Be like, “Hey, how’s things going on in your life?” And start those conversations. So I think that’s a big part for us is returning members. It sounds so simple when I say it, but—

Mike Warkentin (22:52):
Yeah. But you get that from longevity. You get that from staying in the game and learning and being better. And you get these “boomerang clients” because you’ve improved. They knew you, they liked you, they trusted you, and like maybe they fell off for whatever reason, but you’ve re-engaged them and they’re like, “I really like Tommy’s gym. I don’t know why I stopped. I’m ready to come. Oh, this place is even better.” Like, you get that from being a good long-term gym owner. That is a measurable benefit of longevity and being in the game longer. Tell me about the other two wells.

Tommy Alfinito (23:18):
So then the other one is kind of what we were already talking about. So it’s the referrals, and it’s just creating like—it’s not measurable, per se, but like I said, we added that 3-2-1, and then the other two wells that that creates are the referrals. And also just like being very focused on who we’re for. And so like, I feel like it starts by creating the class. So our 3-2-1 might not be your 3-2-1 because it’s set up for who our ideal client is. But every time we’re not growing, we sit down and we say, “Who’s our ideal client?” We have a little sentence that’s written out about it, and then we say, “What parts aren’t filtered? What parts are we missing the mark aren’t for those people?” And for us, the last go around, we made the 3-2-1, and then we redid our social media, where we made sure every picture was of one person, not a group, smiling in the picture. And we made sure every single caption had some portion of our ideal clients. Our ideal client has three characteristics. We made sure every portion had one of them in there. And then we started growing again. So it was just like putting out. Like, it sounds so cheesy, but I say “putting out our bat signal.” Like we put out our bat signal: “These are the people that we want. This is who’s gonna love it here.” And then we bring in those people. And I think when we had the most headaches It was because we maybe had like 50 to 60 percent of our members who are that person that fits that definition. And when the business is growing and the coaches love coming into work and everyone’s happy, it’s when we’re like 80 percent of our membership base is hitting that ideal client definition.

Mike Warkentin (25:04):
Wow. In there, you kinda laid out a genius-level masterclass on organic marketing. And it’s simple. Right? You told me that you like simple stuff. That’s a simple plan, but like put out pictures of your ideal clients smiling. That’s a big one. And get your message in there that shows exactly who you are and what you’re doing and who you’re looking for. That’s how you acquire the right people. Like, it’s so simple. But you could probably pay a consultant a million dollars to try and get back to that point. And you just gave it to ’em for free.

Tommy Alfinito (25:33):
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the thing for us, I think you summed it up perfectly, is like we’ve always grown off organic marketing. We’ve dabbled in paid marketing and never really seen results for us. And I don’t think paid marketing doesn’t work. I just think I’m not good at it. I’m not the person that can do it. But we’re comfortable with that. Organic marketing—and for our ideal client definition, it’s not anything crazy. Ours is “busy parents that want to be coached and wanna come in and socialize with other people.” There, so it’s three points. Those are the three points—we wanna make sure one of them is in everything we post.

Mike Warkentin (26:09):
Tell me that again. It was a busy parents—what was the rest of it?

Tommy Alfinito (26:12):
Busy parents that want to be coached and want to come in to socialize with other people like them.

Mike Warkentin (26:19):
Again, guys, like how simple is that? But if you have that sentence in place, it will focus your entire business on the exact person you need, the exact person that’s going to love you, and the exact person who is going to want to pay you a lot of money to stay at your gym for a lot of years. Like that is again, we’re going back to focus. So, Tommy, I’m not gonna take this any further because you’ve given people so much awesome stuff to think about already. Focus and systems, like those two things I’m hearing from you over and over again. Is there anything I’m missing beyond that? That seems like almost the definition of what you’re doing there?

Tommy Alfinito (26:50):
Yeah, I think that’s it. And I think for the focus thing, I think the thing that was eye opening for me and maybe might help someone else is really this idea that you can only grow one thing at a time. And like that might be for a long, long period of time. So like you can grow one thing, and you can maybe maintain the other things. They might even dip a little bit. But I think that’s the key to growing your business is really grow one thing and get real growth out of that thing. Understand that the other things are gonna just kind of hang out there and maybe even go down a little, and don’t stress about that—cause that’s what we all do. We’re like, “Oh, this thing’s doing awesome, but that thing is going down, so now I have to run over there.” It’s like, “No, you’re seeing results. Stick with that one thing and just understand that that’s the process.” The process I found for growing the gym is focus. Grow that one thing, get it to a really good spot, and then you can take your focus and remember that one thing you just grew, it might dip a little bit, but then you can take your focus and grow something else. And if you just repeat that over and over, you’ll have a wider business that’s pretty bulletproof. I don’t know. That was the thing for me that I learned, and I just think that that was like a real game changer for me. Cause, like I said, normally you see other things and you’re like, “Oh no, I gotta go fix that and I gotta go fix that.” And then nothing’s growing.

Mike Warkentin (28:08):
I have a new puppy, and watching it move around with “puppy-dog mind” is exactly what I used to do as a gym owner. It is the like animal representation of how I used to run a business. You’re the other way, where you are going to this thing and doing this thing until it’s good, and then you’re moving on to this thing, and you’re being very systematic and formulaic about it, and you’ve made the leaderboard as a result. You tell gym owners how to do this as a mentor, do you not?

Tommy Alfinito (28:30):
Yeah. Yeah. For Two-Brain. Yep.

Mike Warkentin (28:32):
If you’re struggling with your focus, struggling with systems, frazzled, got puppy-dog mind, you can work with someone just like Tommy. Book a call to talk to one of our mentors today. Tommy, thanks so much for being here. We’re gonna have you back. We’re gonna talk whiskey.

Tommy Alfinito (28:46):
Yeah, that’ll be fun. Opening day’s actually today.

Mike Warkentin (28:49):
Well I’ll let you get to that. Go cut the ribbon!

Tommy Alfinito (28:52):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s gonna be a bit of a crazy day, but I’m excited to finally have some people come in and see what we’ve been building.

Mike Warkentin (28:58):
Thanks for giving us half an hour to help some gym owners. I really appreciate it.

Tommy Alfinito (29:01):
Yeah, no problem.

Mike Warkentin (29:02):
That was Tommy Alfinito. He’s one of our top revenue generators in April 2023. He just gave you the goods. Listen to this show twice. You can literally fix your business by doing so. I’m Mike Warkentin. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thanks for watching listing. Be sure to subscribe on your way out. Now here’s a final message from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (29:20):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness. Every day I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today!

The post How This Gym Owner Generated $57,000 in Monthly Revenue With No Ad Spend appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Bulking Season: Tipping Points That Erase Your Gym’s Profit

The reason many gym owners can’t turn a profit is they keep “kicking the profit can down the road.”

Here’s what I mean: Too many gym owners set up shop and start paying bills. Then they work hard to recruit—and keep—enough members to cover their costs. And then, as soon as they hit breakeven, they expand—and their expenses exceed their revenue again.

To deal with it, they enter another stressful marketing cycle as they work to fill their space and cover their bills. They try to outrun their costs by adding more clients.

When they fill their space and their schedule and make a little bit of money, they expand again. Maybe they add more space or equipment, or maybe they commit to paying a coach’s salary.

The headcount at the gym is going up and revenue is going up. But the owner is still broke, she’s getting tired, and her fuse is getting shorter.

Solving the Profit Problem

What’s the answer? Increasing the value of each client. We call this metric ARM—average revenue per member. It’s really the difference between high-revenue gyms that are successful and high-revenue gyms that burn brightly and fade fast.

Watch what happens to the graph as revenue goes up but expenses don’t increase as quickly:

This extra profit doesn’t mean you’re greedy. It means:

Your family earns a larger return from your hard work.Your coaches earn more from the opportunity you’ve created.Your clients are more likely to stick around (ARM actually increases length of engagement, or LEG).Less of your money goes to the landlord, power company and municipal tax office (I hate working for those guys).You can afford to give clients and coaches the little “extras” that you dream about—free shirts, fun parties and excursions.You can make a smaller space really great instead of having a big, hollow cave.

Increasing client value is slowly starting to catch on in the fitness business. I’ve been writing about it for over a decade, but I’m still amazed—and thrilled—by its effect on a gym.

Clients come and go, but ARM never goes down.

Want to see how improving ARM will help your gym? Book a call here—and bring your metrics with you!

The post Bulking Season: Tipping Points That Erase Your Gym’s Profit appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Bulking Season: The Best Way to Grow Revenue

If you could do one thing to generate more revenue, what would it be?

Almost every gym owner I ask says, “Get more clients!”

But that’s not the fastest, easiest or smartest way to get more revenue.

Here, I’m going to show you why focusing on average revenue per member (ARM) is actually better than increasing your headcount.

Every Client Comes With Costs

In a service business, every new client costs you. You have to meet with them at intake. You have to pay a trainer to onboard them. You have to call them to keep them on track and follow up with them. You have to buy more equipment and increase your space. Your payroll goes up as you add clients—and this can actually kill gyms.

One old myth in the CrossFit space was that group training scaled better than 1:1 training. In theory, it’s true: One trainer working with 30 people nets the gym a higher return. But in practice, the concept failed.

Gyms went underwater when they leased space for 30, bought equipment for 30 and staffed for 30 but only had an average class attendance of seven.

Even in a karate dojo, where 1:30 is more common and practical, high churn means more marketing. So marketing costs scale up as the business ages.

While costs of production drop relative to client headcount in a product business—think shoes and software—that’s just not the case in service businesses. Coaches and gyms need constant client contact and support, so costs rise with every added client.

You can’t outrun your expenses by just increasing headcount; you have to increase revenue relative to the number of clients you have.

A gym with 300 clients and low rates will struggle to keep the doors open. A gym with 150 clients and a higher ARM can easily provide a $100,000 income to its owner and carry full-time and half-time staff members.

And when ARM goes up in that gym, it doesn’t come with additional expense. So the new revenue drops straight to the bottom line.

New Clients Leave but ARM Sticks Around

Clients can come and go, but when you set your rates, they never go down. And we work hard to help gym owners increase length of engagement because ARM and LEG are multipliers of each other.

I’ve had hundreds of gym owners tell me, “My clients don’t pay much, but they stick around for 10 years!” That’s great—you’re making a difference in their lives. But if you’re martyring yourself to help them, that’s not fair, and it will become unsustainable at some point. Solid ARM sets you and your business up for long-term success.

In the end, large revenue numbers are generated when gyms have enough clients and high value per client.

But don’t take my word for it: Let’s review what the top revenue earners on our most recent leaderboard said. Here they are again (these are monthly average revenues):

And here’s what some of the gym owners on the leaderboard had to say about ARM:

“We sat down with each of the current clients and asked about goals, giving them solutions. ARM at [gym name] is $600.”

“Find products for your customers. … This isn’t overselling. We know that people go outside our facility for different services that we don’t offer. Our first focus is on helping, getting solutions to their problems. Servicing PT, nutrition and group, being consistent with that, has helped us maintain our client base.”

“Acquisition has also gone well, but we’ve turned our focus to servicing the members we have.”

“We moved everybody to 2023 rates and didn’t have a lot of kickback. We do provide a lot of value, and the experience is unlike any other gym. There’s nowhere else on Earth that you can go to get the same experience. We have the full package, and that is hard to find.”

“Our demographic is older—they are looking for function. Look at the population cohort of the Baby Boomers: more educated and affluent. It’s wise for gym owners to focus on this demographic.”

“We are a big gym, 300-plus members, so we’re trying to get ARM and LEG up.”

If you want to bulk up your business, you need to work hard to increase ARM. We can help: We have a host of proven, data-backed tactics our clients use to measurably improve ARM. To find out more, book a call here.

The post Bulking Season: The Best Way to Grow Revenue appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

April Leaderboard: Tips From Gyms That Gross $50,000+ Per Month

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Which gyms in the world make the most money? My name is Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Every month, we produce leaderboards for the top gyms in the world in a bunch of different categories of metrics. We wanna know who’s the best at retention, at client value, and this month we ask “who is making the most revenue?”

Chris Cooper (00:21):
After we develop this leaderboard and figure out the answer across thousands of gyms, we publish it for free for you. We interview the leaders, and we give you their responses so that you can make more revenue, too. If they’re doing something really different, we interview them in depth, and we add that to our curriculum inside the Two-Brain Business mentorship practice for all the gyms that are inside Two-Brain so that they can copy verbatim what these owners are doing. Today, I’ve got some amazing tips from the top 10 gyms worldwide for revenue for you. You’re gonna be surprised to see where some of these gyms are. I cannot wait. I am so excited to share these with you. I’m so proud of the owners and their mentors that help them get there—and their teams, who are building bigger, more meaningful careers because these gyms are driving more revenue. I’m also thrilled for the clients at these gyms, who are getting better health and fitness outcomes because they belong to gyms that are popular and that can keep ’em around for a long time and are gonna be there for the next 30 years.

Chris Cooper (01:20):
So let’s get into this leaderboard. I’m gonna start with Number 10 and work my way up to Number 1 because some of these numbers are unbelievable. I want you to know, though, that every number that I give you is in U.S. dollars. So while some of these gyms come from places outside the U.S., we’ve converted their revenue into U.S. currency so that we’re comparing apples to apples. Cool, here we go. Starting with Number 10, this gym is out of the States. They’re actually in South Carolina. They’re frequently on the leaderboard. I know this isn’t their best month. They’re coming in at Number 10, but it’s still an amazing month, and knowing that this is, you know, a fairly consistent month for them is even more impressive. So Number 10, this gym is earning $53,199 in revenue last month. Hey, one more thing we do here.

Chris Cooper (02:07):
We make sure that this is a standard month for them. It might be their best month ever, but it’s not their best month by like 300 percent, right? They’ve been working to get to this point. What we wanna do is separate out the gyms where the owner has just taken like a quarterly dividend last month, and so, you know, they earn earned $20,000, $20,000, then $50,000, then $20,000, $20,000. We wanna go as much as possible with kind of a rolling average to make sure that they’re consistent. The other thing that we don’t do, that we never do, is report projections. You’ve been fooled by that. I’ve been fooled by that before. You see these guys on Facebook ads and they’re like “this is a million-dollar gym” because they project that they’re going to make a million dollars over the next year. We don’t count anything until it’s happened, until that money is actually in the bank.

Chris Cooper (02:54):
So Number 10, $53,199 in revenue in April 2023. Amazing. We’ve got some good tips from them. Number 9, working our way up here, $55,202. This gym, you’re gonna love this. This gym is in Chile. Now this is in U.S. dollars. Again, they have a lot of members, but it just goes to show you that where you are in the world is less important than you might think. A lot of the times what I hear from gym owners is “well, I’d love to charge that” or “I’d love to make a great living with 150 members, but I am in the,” you know, fill in the blank, “the poorest demographic in my state, the lowest-income demographic in my country.” I don’t know how it’s possible that 500 people have told me that they live in the lowest-income demographic in the United States, but they can’t all live in the lowest-income demographic.

Chris Cooper (03:46):
And if they’re running a coaching business, then, you know, they might want to think about where they’re placing their gym. What’s interesting about this gym in Chile is that they’re not in like the highest-income areas of Chile. They do have a lot of members. They also have a really great ARM, and I love having them on the leaderboard. I’m so proud of them because it shows that you can be successful anywhere. Number 8: $55,681. This is a U.S.-based gym. They’re in kind of a Southern state, not a very high-income area in that state. That state itself is not generally regarded as a high-income state, but these guys are just doing amazing by attracting people who really fit their culture, who really want to be coached and who see the value in coaching services. So that’s Number 8.

Chris Cooper (04:37):
Number 7, $57,200 in revenue last month. That’s again, one gym. This is a CrossFit gym. They’re in the States—$57,200 last month. They’re not in New York City. They’re not in San Francisco. They don’t have a bazillion members. They are still on the revenue leaderboard, and I’ve got some great tips from them coming soon. Narrowly edging them out in Number 6 is $57,519. These guys are on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. They did a little bit more with personal training, but I’ve got an amazing tip from Number 6 coming up for you. You’re gonna love it. They call it the “321 model.” I’ll get to that. I’m so excited to share it with you. And Number 5: $59,878 collected in revenue last month. Again, these are not projections. This is not what they hope to make. This is the actual money that they took from their clients and exchanged for value. Number 4, also from the States: $62,912 cash collected last month in revenue. Number 3: $67,266.

Chris Cooper (05:43):
Amazing, right? Number 2 though, and again, remember, this is in U.S. dollars, $69,121 in revenue, and they’re in Canada. In Canadian dollars, that’s over $80,000, but converted to U.S.,  $69,121 is good enough for second spot on our leaderboard. The Number 1 gym on our leaderboard earned $81,531 in revenue last month. They’re in the States. They’re in the Midwest. I’m super proud of them. Let’s hear how they did it right? Like these are great numbers. And I’m not saying this to shame you. If your gym’s doing $15,000 or less like my gym was doing once upon a time, I’m using these people to inspire you, to show you what’s possible. Because until now, nobody in the fitness industry—let alone the microgym community, let alone the CrossFit, high-intensity interval training, strength and conditioning community—had any idea of what was possible or what they should even be gunning for.

Chris Cooper (06:39):
You know, it’s like when the first guy squatted a thousand pounds. None of us knew it was possible, and so nobody set their sights on it, but after he did it, five or six more people did it the next year. And so the reason I’m sharing this Number 1 gym, $81,531 in revenue, is to inspire you to beat them. Get there. It’s possible. You can do it. All right, let’s, let’s get into the tactics. That’s what I love. How exactly did they do it? Now that we know who they are, now that they’ve proven they can do it, what can they teach us? Here we go. So we interviewed each one of these gyms and we asked them “what’s your top tips? How did you get there to these high revenue numbers?” And I’m gonna share them with you in no particular order, but I am gonna call out No. 6 because he’s got this “321 strategy” that I think you’re going to love.

Chris Cooper (07:28):
So first, top tip Number 1: “$70,000 a month has been a number that we’ve been working on keeping. We’ve been seeing those numbers for a couple of years. A lot of it is varied, slow and steady growth. But over the last six-to-nine months, we’ve worked on retention and other points. We’ve worked specifically on growing personal training or our membership base.” So the key here to growing retention for this gym was focusing on one thing at a time for a little while. They focused on just growing personal training. Then they focused just on growing group membership for a few months. Then they focused on retention. And they’re doing this in about 90-day sprints: “So for the next 90 days, here’s what we’re gonna focus on.” If you’re focusing on retention, you can start with “here is our LEG, our length of engagement. Right now, our goal over the next 90 days is to increase our length of engagement by one month.”

Chris Cooper (08:17):
You know, and you can work in these six, these 90-day sprints and focus specifically on one area at a time. That is way more powerful than trying to improve retention, personal-training, group-class attendance, coaching proficiency—trying to improve everything at one time. There’s a lot of wisdom in that quote. The second one said, “Well, we did increase our rate in classes from March, and also we’ve started working on professional development in the last 18 months. We’ve had a big refinement in our coaches. Now we meet weekly with our coaches. We invest time and energy into them. We talk specifically about how to coach better. We give them checklists. We review all of our team announcements. We review Bright Spots Fridays. We give them challenges, and we brainstorm ways for them to remove obstacles for our clients to make progress. We also have Career Roadmap sessions where we give them entrepreneurial opportunities and a seven-day plan.”

Chris Cooper (09:12):
So what’s interesting here is that while they are working to make the coaches better coaches, what they’re actually mentoring their coaches on is how to build better careers. So if you look at what they’re doing here, okay, evaluating, yeah, super important, right? You have to have a good standard of service Next you know, Bright Spots Fridays: “What progress are our clients making? How can we remove obstacles to our clients’ progress?” So they’re actually talking about the programming and the delivery and the outcomes. Then they’re talking about entrepreneurial opportunities: “How can you grow your own income or grow your career as a coach while growing the pie for the entire gym?” And that’s an amazing way to grow revenue in your gym. And then finally really mentoring the coach. “What can you work on over the next seven days?” So if you want to improve your coaches, you probably don’t need to send ’em to another seminar.

Chris Cooper (10:04):
They probably don’t need another certification. What they need is an evaluation, a plan, and then like a seven-day very specific plan—what to work on. Okay? Next. This came from another top 10 gym for revenue. “Retention is our focus. We work to find products for our customers instead of customers for our products. We’ve been getting the staff to buy into this because it doesn’t feel like overselling. We know that people go outside of our facility for different services that we don’t offer. So our first focus is always on helping, getting them solutions to their problems. So servicing personal training and nutrition and group, and then being consistent with that has helped us maintain our client base.” So this gym has really focused on doing a great job of keeping the clients that they had and giving them a 10-outta-10 experience in whatever service they were paying for.

Chris Cooper (10:55):
Then they started looking to onboard other potential services. This next gym said, “Acquisition is going well, but we’ve really turned our focus to servicing the clients that we have.” Aha! That’s two gyms so far on the top 10 leaderboard for revenue who say “we’re focusing on servicing the clients that we have really, really well.” They also moved everybody to a 2023 rate. They got rid of discounts. They moved everybody to pay for the value that they’re currently providing instead of the value that they provided way back in 2018. That’s really key. As you’re upgrading your service and improving your coaching, you are increasing your value, and you should charge accordingly. Okay, this was some really interesting feedback, though. “We do provide a lot of value. The experience is unlike any other gym. There’s nowhere else on Earth that you can go to give you the same experience. We have a full package, and that’s hard to find.” Okay? Now that’s interesting, but listen to this: “Our demographic is older. They are looking for function. Look at the population cohort of the Baby Boomers. They’re more educated and affluent than the generation before or after. It’s wise for gym owners to focus on this demographic. Our average age at our gym is 64 and female. Generally we have 70 women to every 30 men in our gym.” Now, the key here is that they know their target demographic, and they focus on that. There are other target demographics that you can have. The Boomers are a great one, absolutely. But if you’re really gonna focus on them, it can’t be as a sideline program. You can’t have like death metal playing and then you turn that down to like classic ‘70s rock at 11 a.m. for one hour. You really have to be focused on that demographic.

Chris Cooper (12:42):
Okay? Now here’s what I promised you. All right, so this was the Number 6 on the leaderboard. This guy has this “321 strategy” that I’m about to share. So this gym owner we interviewed, he’s on the leaderboard. You’re going to hear him in an upcoming podcast. He said, “This will sound obvious, but with our team, we focused on the acronym that I made up: ‘321 to a perfect class.’ Check in on three people by name. Have two touchpoints for every person in the class, and make one connection member to member.” And that’s what’s driven their referrals—3, 2, 1. So call three people by name. Create two touchpoints for every person. Like talk to each person at least twice. And connect one person to another new person. “And that’s what’s driven up our referrals. So when somebody refers, we do a gift to surprise and delight to them, and we take a photo for social media with the referrer and the referee. We also have a client success manager.” So this is a person who’s not a coach, but their job is just client relationships. “And she’s allowed to spend up around 50 bucks, with a hundred dollars max, and they can give something meaningful to the person who makes a referral.” So this gym is on the leaderboard. They’re Number 6, and they are focusing on client referrals more than anything else. “A big driver of our revenue increases,” they said, “has been building a referral culture in the gym. Our mission is using fitness to create personal connection. So we do a lot of secondary programs like personal training and nutrition, but that maintains constantly, and we grow our groups all the time by working on referrals.” Love it. Okay, another gym on the Top 10 gives this advice: “We are diligently focused on generating current Google reviews. I ask five members per week and remind five that haven’t submitted anything.”

Chris Cooper (14:32):
“The gym performs well on organic search. We get 30-50 new leads per month from the organic Google marketing. I’ve experimented with paid ads, but haven’t seen as much traffic that way. So I focus on keeping our Google reviews steady and fresh. We have about 180 reviews at 4.5 to five stars. I pull a list of new members around the 90-day mark, and as long as they come regularly, I’ll ask them to do a Google review. Secondly, to increase No Sweat Intro availability, we’re trying to cross-train our client success managers on sales, making early morning and late evening and weekend availability for the NSIs.” So right now, this gym owner has himself and three staff members doing sales and lead nurture. So this is where you know, their salesperson is really like their client success person—where you could even train a coach, right? And then that way the new client has a personal connection who can say, “Hey, I met you at the NSI. I’m gonna make sure your first 90 days to your lifetime journey is great.” They’re focusing on retention, and keep keeping those clients around. So what you hear over and over with these themes are “here’s how I get clients. But more than anything, here’s how I keep clients.” And you hear over and over with these gyms that have massive revenue that they’re not focused on, like, “How do I bring in 30 new clients next month?” Or “how do I generate a hundred new leads?” It’s “how do I keep people longer? How do I develop my staff? How do I create an entrepreneurial opportunity for my staff? How do I make my service get better and better and better? And how do I create more and more touchpoints with my clients?”

Chris Cooper (16:08):
I am so proud of these gyms. If you’re on the Top 10 leaderboard, hey, I’m proud of you for inspiring the rest of us. If you’re not on the leaderboard this month, I’m proud of you for fighting to get on there by building a business that will save more lives. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you wanna ask questions or talk about this episode at any time, join gymownersunited.com. There are 7,400 other gym owners in that group. We keep it light, we keep it positive, we keep it helpful, and you know, we keep it Two-Brain. So until next time, make more revenue.

The post April Leaderboard: Tips From Gyms That Gross $50,000+ Per Month appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Bulking Season: The Top 10 Gyms Flex on our Revenue Leaderboard

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

No matter how lean your operation is, how great your retention is and how hard you can work, at some point you’re going to need to earn money.

As your team grows, you’ll need to pay its members. As your client list grows, you’ll need more revenue to support your customers.

Adding more revenue is like adding more muscle to a body: It’s not the only requirement for a strong and fit business, but it’s a big part.

How do you make more money? There are 30,000 gurus out there willing to tell you. But I want to tell you the real answer. To get to the truth, we track gyms around the world, find out who’s actually generating more revenue and then share their methods with you.

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

Here’s how they did it:

“We’ve been seeing those numbers for a couple years. A lot of it is varied, slow and steady growth. Over the last 6-9 months, we’ve worked on retention. At other points we’ve worked on growing PT or membership base. We identified the bottlenecks and worked on those.”

“We added in system and accountability checks. We have four full-time coaches; each has retention responsibilities. Each has about 50-100 clients for which they’re responsible. Duties include providing accountability (very specific spreadsheet they use) and running reports to see low-attendance members. Every month, they do a check-in on each member. More closely following goal sessions, they have targets to meet. … We talk about any clients who cancel and review the actions taken to retain.”

“We hold a weekly meeting to talk about the member journey. … We’ve become more intentional in our marketing and make sure we are getting the right clients in the door.”

“We did increase our rate in classes—March. Professional development: In the last 18 months we have had a big refinement on our coaches. We meet weekly with our coaches, … talking about coaching, specifically—checklist, review all team announcements, review Bright Spots Friday, challenges. We review the ‘intrapreneurial plan’: ‘What can you work on in the next seven days?’ … We have a CSM who handles the client check-ins.”

“We have a kids program that is just a recurring monthly membership, marketing around the sports season—middle school and high school. One of the owners, two of his sons are on the football team, and that sold out the program. We also host ‘athlete team night’ in exchange for sponsorship. So this year we decided we would sponsor teams. (We provide) a team bonding experience—100% attendance. (We) paid them to have the logo on the banner, but … we expose them to the gym.”

“We set a goal across the gyms: $1 million revenue. We broke it down per month into $83,000: specialty PT, kids, nutrition, etc.—we have a target for each of the revenue streams. Example: 200+ group-class members, 21 PT sessions a week, 6 new fundamentals (on-ramps) weekly, 66 participants in the specialty seminars, 15 ongoing nutrition members, X number of kids. The coaches now can be very focused to reach the targets. Being very focused on targets has really helped us to hone in on meeting the revenue targets. We know where we’re falling down.”

“When you break down there targets by revenue stream, none of the targets seem unattainable! … We use a whiteboard in the office for visual tracking (monthly) to keep it top of mind. Great team—I’m fortunate to have a top-notch GM.”

“At the new location, revenue went from $16,000 to $33,000—in six months we’ve doubled the revenue. We concentrated on the big three: PT, small group (yoga and Pilates and a mobility class) and nutrition.”

“We focused on the acronym I made up: 321 to a perfect class. Check in on three people by name, two touch points for each, one connection member to member. And this has driven our referrals. When someone refers, we do a gift to ‘surprise and delight’ them and take a photo for social media with the referrer and their referee. The client success manager (CSM) can spend around $50, with $100 max, and they can give something meaningful to the referee. A big driver of our revenue increases has been building a referral culture in the gym. Our mission is ‘using fitness to create personal connection.'”

“We diligently focused on generating current Google reviews. I ask five members per week and remind five that haven’t submitted anything. The gym performs well on organic search. We get 30-50 new leads/month from the organic Google marketing. I’ve experimented with paid ads but haven’t seen much traffic that way. I focus on keeping that steady and fresh. We have about 180 reviews at 4.5 stars. I pull a list of new members around 90 days, and as long as they come regularly, I’ll ask them from a Google review.

“To increase No Sweat Intro (NSI) availability we are trying to cross-train the CSMs on sales, making early morning and late evening and weekend availability for the NSIs. We have myself and three staff members doing sales/CSM duties. We’re testing something where the salesperson is also CSM in that they follow them though the sales to the rest of the client journey: ‘I met you at the NSI, and I’m going to make sure your first 90 days are great.’ We convert 80-90 percent on the NSIs. At the NSI, people regularly comment on how many reviews we have on Google. We have a really visible location. That’s the exposure to us, or they see the current Google review.”

In the next post in this series, I’ll tell you about the difference between more revenue and more clients. Then I’ll share insight into “tipping points” for revenue in your business and explain why these points are so important.

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Strength Training: The Super-Strong Marketing Play for Gym Owners

Is strong the new sexy?

Maybe. I’ll let you decide.

But I can tell you strength is on consumers’ minds right now, and if you’re a microgym owner, you’re all set to capitalize.

A recent article on Clubsolutionsmagazine.com bore this title: “Surge in Demand for Strength Training.”

You can read it here.

The author, Alan Leach, is the CEO of West Wood Club, a string of six facilities in Ireland. He said he’s noticed a dramatic increase in strength training in the last five years. I’ve pulled a few details out of the article for you:

Leach says that on a regular day, 50 percent of the people on squat racks and lifting platforms are now women.It’s no longer uncommon to see 70-year-olds squatting and bench pressing.Each club has “up to 15 power racks and lifting platforms”—a sharp increase from 10 years ago, when a single cage was common.Here’s my favorite: Leach said a quick straw poll at the IHRSA 2023 conference revealed 700 gym owners had seen an increase in the demand for strength training.

I’ll add one more stat to back up Leach’s observations: Life Time has 160 clubs in North America, and in its annual fitness survey of 1,000 people, building muscle was the No. 1 fitness goal going into 2023. It ranked even above weight loss.

All this is great news for microgym owners. Here’s why:

If you own a microgym, you have the equipment and knowledge that will allow you capitalize on the renewed interest in free weights, strength training, muscle building and resistance training as a key part of a weight-loss plan.

The Increased Value of Coaching

Fifteen years ago, gyms were packed with machines, and it could be difficult to compete against large, corporate facilities with a million dollars of equipment. The functional fitness revolution changed that, and the relatively low cost of barbells, bumper plates, kettlebells, dumbbells and medicine balls made it much easier to start a gym.

Stats from our “2022 State of the Industry” report: On average, it costs $294,000 to open an access-only gym but only $58,000 to open a CrossFit gym and $49,000 to open a PT studio.

So it’s become much cheaper to open—and maintain—a gym that can offer what consumers currently want.

But it gets better.

Machines have instructions printed on them, and most people don’t get much guidance before using them.

Barbells and dumbbells just aren’t quite as accessible even if a person can learn to use them in relatively short order. Ask a brand new client to use a leg-press machine for 8 reps and then perform 3 barbell squat cleans—you’ll instantly see how the use of free weights increases the value of a coach.

The renewed interest in strength drives that value higher. Yes, a beginner can build strength even with badly chosen exercises, suboptimal loads and machines that isolate certain muscle groups. But to build full-body strength faster and keep the gains coming after the first few months, clients would be best to use free weights and follow a precise plan—which an experienced coach can provide.

If the modern fitness consumer wants to build strength, the microgym owner has the exact tools and knowledge to make that happen.

One final bonus: Strength training comes with “built-in bright spots.” Clients who are interested in strength quickly start tracking their numbers, which gives the clever gym owner a host of opportunities to highlight progress and celebrate accomplishments. It’s certainly possible to congratulate a client for doing a set of 10 hamstring curls with a two-second eccentric, but it’s much easier to celebrate a new deadlift PR.

Do This

If more fitness consumers are currently looking for strength training, be sure your website and social platforms showcase your expertise, equipment and programs.

That doesn’t mean you can’t post about weight loss and healthy eating. And I’m not suggesting you start posting pictures of burly people performing 500-lb. deadlifts with blood running down their shins (I did this back in the day).

I’d simply suggest you review your content calendar and ensure you’re showing off strength training about three times a week. If you want a quick plan, here it is:

Write a blog on strength training every week.  Embed a video in which you demonstrate a certain movement and explain why it can be used to build strength.Include a picture of a client celebrating a strength PR—get Sam to smile and hold a whiteboard that says “100-lb. bench press!”Send the blog to your mailing list.Put the video and pic on social media.Take the best lines from the blog and make a graphic carousel.

Two-Brain clients: You don’t even need to spend time taking pictures. You’ve got access to a host of fully licensed stock images like the one below in our Content Vault. Feel free to brand them and use them to promote strength training today.

My point: People want to be strong right now. Microgym owners can make that happen.

Don’t miss this golden opportunity to show off your services and help more people accomplish their goals!

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Two-Brain Mentorship: From Free Help to Earning More Than $100,000 Per Year

Announcer (00:00):

How does Two-Brain mentorship work? You’ll find out today on this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you wanna see the resources mentioned in the show, check our YouTube channel for the video. Here’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (00:10):
Hey, I’m Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, and sometimes people who have just found us ask me, “What is Two-Brain?” Two-Brain is the largest mentorship practice for gym owners in the world. We work one on one with gym owners to help them grow their gyms, expand their impact and save more lives. Here’s how we do it. The first level of our mentorship practice is free. We have been publishing free blog posts every day for a decade to help people grow their gyms, and now we consolidate all those free podcasts and blog posts and YouTube videos and tools and tactics into one place called Gym Owners United. This is a free public Facebook group that you can join just by going to Gymownersunited.com. There are 7,000 gym owners in there, and you’ll see: Here are some of the free guides that we just hand out.

Chris Cooper (00:58):
This is free. It’s not the same as mentorship, but it’s better than most mentorship programs. We hear that all the time: “Your free stuff is better than everybody else’s paid stuff.” From there, when you’re ready, you enter our actual mentorship practice, and everybody starts with a program that we call RampUp. RampUp is a 12-week sprint to help you build the systems that will run your gym. It will help you get clients at a new higher value that pay you what you’re actually worth. It will help you improve your average revenue per member, the number of members that you have, how long each member stays, how much you’re paid per hour in your gym. And it will get you a better return on all of your other investments, too. And at the end, you get to give yourself a raise, which I absolutely love. I wanted to make sure that the RampUp program, even by itself without the rest of our mentorship, pays for itself and gets you a great return on investment.

Chris Cooper (01:50):
And it does. The average ROI on RampUp is more than double its price. So here’s just a quick view of what people work on as they’re going through our process. You start with RampUp, and then when you’re ready, you go into Growth Phase. And then finally Tinker. And I’m gonna walk you through each one in more depth here. But the goal of RampUp is just to get you at least a return on your investment while you’re building the systems that will run your gym for the next 30 years, including marketing systems, sales systems, retention systems, staff ascension systems and more In Growth Phase, we’re gonna go all in on what’s working. We’re going to help you grow your gym through adding staff, adding equipment, space, et cetera. All the Growth stuff: marketing different funnels, that kind of thing.

Chris Cooper (02:35):
And in Tinker, we really want you to build enough wealth so that you can retire from this, provide your family with what they want, and, you know, just keep growing your empire if you want to. So when you’re in RampUp, I talked to you about the goals. Here’s a sample: Toward the end of RampUp, we wanna make sure that you’ve got new members, that you’re getting a great return on the program. Here’s some of the ways that we lay it out. You’re gonna go through coursework. You’re gonna work one on one with a mentor. This is not a group-coaching program where you’re on this call with 50 other people or even five other people. It’s you one on one growing your gym with your mentor, okay? And toward the end of RampUp, we wanna make sure that you’re making new revenue.

Chris Cooper (03:16):
Here’s our sales plan. We want you to work through all of this and make sure that you’re actually growing. Okay? So we do all these different things, all in RampUp. We tell you exactly how to do all of them. Next, you go into the Growth Phase, and the Growth Phase is where now we’re gonna go all in on what’s working. So now you’ve got operational systems, and we’re gonna focus mostly on what’s required to grow. While there are some fundamental marketing strategies that I just showed you in RampUp, in Growth we’re gonna optimize them, and we’re gonna go all in on what’s working best. It’s different for everybody. And so now you have a lot more going on with staff and expansion and equipment—everything. So in Growth, you have a toolkit. You’re still gonna work one on one with a mentor. You’re gonna get on a monthly call with them.

Chris Cooper (04:01):
They’re going to look at all of your different metrics here. They’re gonna help you decide what your priority is for growth. They’re gonna give you exactly the tools that you need. I’m just kind of scrolling through some of the tools that we give you. You can see this stuff if you check the video on YouTube. These are all full courses with all the tools and templates, job descriptions, scripts—everything that you need, everything to help you grow your business faster. You don’t have to sort through all the free content, read all the books. It’s just like, “Here you go. Here’s all the stuff that you need.” You know, you need your content done for you? Don’t sign up for AI. Click our Content Vault. And these are proven strategies, by the way. These are not just somebody’s brainstorm. We’ve used them. We’ve collected the data on them. We know that they work. Once you’re done Growth Phase, you’ve achieved a hundred thousand dollars per year, right?

Chris Cooper (04:44):
So now you know that you have a sustainable business that can support you and your family. This was a dream that I couldn’t even see in 2008. You know that you can make a good living, and, best of all, you can do it without sacrificing your values. You can build a business that you’re proud to own without resorting to slimy gimmicks and tactics and crap like that. Now that you’ve built this, though, you can get into Tinker Phase, right? So now you have built a good income. You know that you can do it. You’re helping other people make a career. But I want you to grow to the point where you have a future. So you need to build enough wealth where you can retire or scale up your fitness empire to have multiple locations or we say “become a millionaire” because that will set you up to have options and create impact.

Chris Cooper (05:29):
In 2022, we created 27 brand new millionaires. And in the first two months of 2023, we created six more. We also select future mentors for Two-Brain from that Tinker program because we want CrossFit affiliates and other types of gym owners to have actually proven themselves to be successful before we let them coach other people. So then we hire the best to coach others, and that’s why the best CrossFit owners can work with like the best CrossFit mentors—because they’ve actually proven that they can be successful. They’re not just saying that “this is how the Two-Brain system works.” We have an ethos of “help first.” We always wanna make gym owners successful even before they sign up for our program. I want to give you the tools that will pay for it, but at every step of the way, we wanna make sure that we have an amazing ROI on our program, doing it the best way that we possibly know how, which is one-on-one mentorship. I hope to see you in our practice. I hope you keep growing your gym, expanding your impact and saving more lives.

Chris Cooper (06:28):
We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined in the group. We share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in the group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to Gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today!

The post Two-Brain Mentorship: From Free Help to Earning More Than $100,000 Per Year appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Wealth, Impact, Legacy: The Two-Brain Tinker Program

The purpose of RampUp, our first stage of mentorship, is to build the systems that will allow you to earn $100,000 per year and run your gym for decades.

The purpose of Growth Phase is to go all in on staffing and marketing to reach $100,000 in earnings as fast as possible—and then go a little further.

So what happens when you’re earning a bit more than you need and spending a little less time running your gym?

That’s when it’s time to build the next level: your wealth, your impact and your legacy.

This is our Tinker Program.

The Tinker Program takes gym owners from earning around $100,000 a year to a net worth of $1 million or more (one Tinker is very close to the $10 million mark now).

We do this by focusing on one of three options:

1. Building your gym empire larger, with multiple locations or an enormous single location.

2. Starting a new business using the skills and resources acquired from running your gym.

3. Investing in passive assets that earn money while you sleep.

Of course, we also train you in leadership and mentor you to create a lifestyle that brings you joy and satisfaction.

This program includes four meetups per year in the U.S., 1:1 coaching, group calls, a huge toolkit of resources, and high-level special guests and speakers. You’ll be placed on a Tinker Board made up of your peers so you build deep, lifelong relationships with other gym owners at your level.

The purpose of Tinker Phase is more than wealth accumulation. I want you to have a path to a real career: That means a plan to retire someday, a way to create multigenerational wealth for your family, and a way to make sure your impact reaches your entire town.

The key to becoming a successful entrepreneur isn’t to read the most books. It’s to have the right resources at the right time. You must place your focus on the appropriate spot instead of worrying about all possible options, getting distracted and failing to grow.

The Two-Brain program delivers mentorship in a different way at each stage, but we know that 1:1 mentorship gets results fastest.

Click here to talk to our intake team.

The post Wealth, Impact, Legacy: The Two-Brain Tinker Program appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

RampUp: Systems for Success as a Gym Owner

Our mentorship program for gym owners is divided into three phases.

We break it up this way to give you exactly what you need when you need it.

Instead of giving you way too much information—which causes paralysis and slows you down—we focus on specific outcomes for each stage.

Our RampUp program is a 12-week sprint where you build the systems for marketing, sales, retention, staff ascension, paying yourself and managing expenses. These systems will help you for the next 30 years or more.

Then our Growth program helps you optimize those systems to maximize their effect, stay focused on marketing that works and grow your team. We want to get you earning $100,000—or more—as quickly as possible using the systems you built in RampUp.

Our Tinker program then helps you reinvest your time and money into wealth building, impact and investments.

Here’s the breakdown:

Here’s a short video in which I walk through the the first phase of mentorship in depth:

In the next post, I’ll tell you more about Growth Phase.

The post RampUp: Systems for Success as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Mentorship FAQ: Coop’s Got the Answers You Need

Announcer (00:00):
This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Today, Coop answers your questions about mentorship. Please hit subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Now, here’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (00:09):
We get a lot of questions about the nuances of the Two-Brain Business mentorship program. We’ve worked with over 1,700 gyms around the world. There are currently 868 gyms in our mentorship practice. We’re the largest in the world, and we sometimes get questions about the specifics. So I want to answer those, and I’m gonna go through them step by step. These are the top questions that people ask me about mentorship programs with Two-Brain. The first one is “I don’t have a CrossFit gym. How will your model work for me?” The answer is that we’re a one-on-one mentorship practice. And so while we build similar systems for every gym—like systems for marketing, systems for sales, retention—everyone is tailored. And so that means that we give you a course with curriculum and templates, and then we also assign a mentor to work directly with you and make the changes.

Chris Cooper (01:00):
The hard part about turning your gym around or taking it to the next level isn’t knowing what to do. It’s really filtering all the information, creating time and space to actually get the work done, avoiding the overwhelm, and then taking the information and translating it to your specific gym. So before Two-Brain, there really was no model for CrossFit affiliates or even microgyms. And so we built this model that allows us to be a little bit flexible. Think of it as kind of a paint by numbers, where your mentor can show you “here are the lines. Here’s what we’re trying to build” and then help you paint your own work of art in your gym. For example, we might give you a staff playbook, and we’ll say, “Here’s the template. Here are all the parts that you need. Here’s some text from my gym or from Chris’s gym or from another mentor’s gym, and let’s go through it and tailor it. And our goal is to have it done by Friday so we can deliver it to your staff at the staff meeting on Saturday. Here’s how we’re going to deliver it. Here’s how we’re gonna have that conversation.” Et cetera. You can go back and forth with the mentor about setting up your policies, but the point is just to get your business out of your head and onto paper. Now, when I did this exercise on my own, it filled up an entire weekend, and I had to revise it, revise it, revise it for years. You are going to be able to do this in about two hours because you’re starting with a template, but it’ll still be your own. So it doesn’t matter what kind of microgym you own or what kind of coaching business you own. That’s your method. Your business model can be built one on one with a mentor regardless of what your method is.

Chris Cooper (02:32):
And, of course, you know about half the gyms that we work with are CrossFit gyms. Over 30 of our mentor team members are CrossFit affiliates, but we also work a lot with boot-camp gyms, strength-and-conditioning gyms, even franchises like 9Round, F45, stuff like that. And the key is that we can tailor your systems to your business, but we want you to build systems so that you have a business. The next question is “what if I don’t like my mentor or it doesn’t work out; it’s not a perfect fit?” We’ve been doing this for a very long time, and our mentor-match process is really amazing. That said, about one time in a hundred, situations change or maybe you find like, “I don’t really sync with this mentor,” or, “Hey, the time zones are making it tough to work with this person.” Or, you know, “Is there somebody that can just hold me more accountable or teach a different way” or something like that.

Chris Cooper (03:27):
When that happens, we’re happy to make a mentor switch. Now keep in mind that your mentor is not your virtual assistant. Your mentor is a successful entrepreneur in the fitness business who has dedicated some of their time, usually about five or 10 hours a week, to mentoring other gym owners. So this has to be a perfect fit for them, too, because they’re not just in this to get paid. They’re really in this to serve and to help you. They’re not here to do the work for you, but they are here to lend their expertise, their story, their experience to the systems that you’re going to build through Two-Brain. So that’s why it’s okay to change mentors—because they’re still going to be working through the systems with you. They’re still gonna be using the same tools, but their personality might be different, and we can always work to optimize that.

Chris Cooper (04:15):
Personally, I like to work one on one with a mentor for about two years, and at that point we’re almost like friends, and I’m not really feeling as accountable to them as I did when I started. So two years for me is kind of like my limit with one mentor. The beautiful part about Two-Brain is that with over 60 mentors worldwide, you can shift mentors, and your new mentor will know all about your business, all about your progress, what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, all of your metrics, and you’re not starting from scratch. You know, you’re 80% of the way there already, and now they’re just gonna have a different approach in delivery and accountability and stuff like that. The next question is “what if I don’t see an ROI?” The average return on investment in mentorship at Two-Brain depends on which program you’re in, but even in our most basic program—called RampUp—the average ROI is 2.4 times what you invest.

Chris Cooper (05:06):
So for every dollar you put into RampUp, you get about $2.40 back. The average ROI on Growth Phase is about 13X. So the average person in Growth puts a dollar in and gets about 13 back. The real difference here isn’t that one program is better than the other. It’s that results compound from mentorship. And so what that means is that when you start building the systems in RampUp, you start to see some gains right away, but those gains get bigger and bigger and bigger the longer you run those systems, the longer you run that marketing, the longer you use that sales strategy, the longer you’re employing those retention systems. And so in Growth Phase, while you’re working on new stuff for marketing, sales and staff ascension, the stuff that you built in RampUp is actually continuing to work for you and compound.

Chris Cooper (05:49):
And that’s the beautiful part about this program: those things can keep working for you, keep compounding for many, many, many years. Really the only people in the history of Two-Brain who haven’t had a positive ROI on mentorship—and I’m only talking within the narrow window that they’re within Two-Brain; everybody has a positive ROI on mentorship if given enough time. There’s maybe one or two people who have said like, “I’m not getting a good ROI here.” That is always because they didn’t have time to actually do the work. In one case, the person came in skeptical and really just wasn’t convinced before they started. They shouldn’t have started; we shouldn’t have let them in. In the other cases it’s always been “I just don’t have time to execute on this.” And so that’s why in the intake process now we ask, “Do you have 30 minutes a day to actually work on your business or can you find that 30 minutes?”

Chris Cooper (06:40):
So that’s basically how ROI works on mentorship. Any mentor that I’ve always had has always given me an amazing ROI. What’s changed is not the amount of ROI; it’s the time window required to reach that ROI. And that has always depended on how much work focus and dedication I can put into the program. Next question: “How long will it take to turn my business around?” We get this a lot. Honestly, about 10% of the people who come into Two-Brain haven’t started a gym yet. They wanna start on the right foot, they want to get clients in the door, and they wanna be cash-flow positive on opening day. But most gyms coming into Two-Brain have been open for a while. Like me, the founder said, “I’m just gonna figure it out on my own.” And you know, now they, they want some help.

Chris Cooper (07:24):
Maybe they’re doing really well and they want to take it to the next level. Maybe they’re struggling and they need to fix it. In general, a good rule of thumb is that every mistake that you make when you open takes about six months to fix. So if you’re off on your pricing, it’s gonna take about six months to completely fix that. If you’re off and you don’t have an on-ramp process, you know, we can fix that in under a week. But in general, people come in with about three big problems. They have a staff problem, they have a pricing problem, or they have a marketing problem—or I guess a retention problem, too. And when we’re fixing those things, these are big changes. But again, we’re fixing something that’s been broken for several years, and we’re gonna try and fix it for decades so that we don’t have to fix it again.

Chris Cooper (08:05):
So that can sometimes take a couple of months. If your business comes in and you’re struggling with marketing and with sales and with retention and with systems and with staff, then, yeah, it’s gonna take a little bit longer to fix those things. But you can rest assured knowing that those things are getting fixed. If you’re not actively fixing those things, they never just fix themselves. They always just get worse. The next question is “my business is running well. I don’t think I need a mentor. Is that correct?” You know, the concept of what “well” means in this industry is really undefined. You know, if things are going okay and you’re breaking even, some people will say that they’re doing “well.” If you’re getting paid a little bit, but it’s not enough to sustain your lifestyle, some people will say they’re doing “well.” I even know gym owners who will say that they’re “crushing it” and they’re not even taking a paycheck home or they’re making less than $50,000 a year.

Chris Cooper (08:57):
It’s time that we redefine what “good” means in this industry. And to me, you’re doing well if you’re making $100,000 a year or more and you’re not working a 60-hour work week at your gym. So if we start with that definition, some people will still say, “Ah, I think I’m doing pretty well, but there’s always a next level.” So, for example, if you’re making less than a $100,000 net owner benefit per year, you can use a mentor to get there faster. So if you’re not making any ground, then you’re probably never gonna get there. But, you know, you can use a mentor to start that process, start building momentum and get there faster than you would on your own. If you’re already making $50K a year, then the jump from $50,000 to $100,000 is much faster with a mentor’s help.

Chris Cooper (09:39):
Because when you buy a mentor, you’re buying speed. If you’re already over $100,000 net owner benefit per year, you still should be thinking about what happens when you can’t make income anymore. So that’s all income. But what you actually want is wealth, because even if you’re doing well right now, making a good income, you can’t work forever. Time is actually the more valuable asset. And so it’s really hard to leverage. Like, “What can I do right now that will set me up for the time when I’m not gonna want to train anymore?” So for me there’s always another level, and it’s just a matter of being coachable enough to ask like, “What comes next for me?” That’s why I’m always hiring mentors. You know, I have a pretty massive worldwide business right now, and I invest more in mentorship now than I ever have because I need to. I see opportunities to grow myself as a leader, as a marketer, as somebody who can get better results.

Chris Cooper (10:34):
You know, as a husband and father—all these things. The more you look for ways to improve yourself, the more you’ll find, and the faster you and your business will grow, too. So there’s never a point where I think anybody says, “I don’t need a mentor.” The most successful people in life generally have more than one. The next question that we get a lot is “what makes Two-Brain different from all the biz coaches out there?” You know, I’m sure you’ve heard of this before or you’ve seen like 50 million ads about “I will flood your gym with 30 leads,” “I’ll get you 30 clients” and stuff. So Two-Brain was really founded on “here’s what I need to fix my gym.” You know, the early blog Don’tbuyads.com, which I ran for three and a half years, was just letters to myself.

Chris Cooper (11:20):
Like, “Here’s how I screwed this up, here’s how I’m fixing it, here’s how it’s working.” And it was almost like tracking a science experiment where, you know, I wanted to make sure that I was doing things right and, you know, changing one little thing at a time. So what Two-Brain does is it brings a decade of experience into filtering data and knowledge. And instead of just hyping and selling the next greatest thing, we actually test everything and make sure that something is working, and we figure out the best practices before we give it to our clients. And that empirical approach is really rare. Like in business coaching, we certify and train our mentors. So the way that it works is a client enters Two-Brain, they go through RampUp, they work on their growth, they get to $100,000 net owner benefit a year.

Chris Cooper (12:07):
They get into our Tinker program and start building their wealth. And at that point they might decide that part of their legacy is to help other gym owners. And so they apply for our mentorship program, and then the mentorship program takes about six months to complete. They are trained on how to actually mentor people, they’re certified, and then they’re trained on our model. So there’s a lot that goes into it. And every single mentor that comes through the Two-Brain Mentor Certification Program is highly skilled. They’re tested. They, you know, work with people so they’re not just being thrown live to clients, and they’re drawing off a massive data set. You know, the old days a decade ago where you could say “do this, it worked for me,” those days are gone. And now we need to know like, does this tactic or does this specific strategy work for everybody?

Chris Cooper (12:57):
And what are the limit cases where it doesn’t work? So I like talking with data and I like talking with science. Two-Brain is an empirical program, which means that we’re always improving, we’re always auditing, we’re always making sure that we’re putting just the best out, and we’re also filtering. So the other value of a good mentor is that they filter out the stuff that you don’t need. So you don’t have to sort through this massive pile of ideas, options and pick out what’s gonna work or like test it yourself. What the mentor’s gonna do is say like, “Just do this exact thing right now. You can worry about that later.” Or “that one’s not a good fit for you.” So that’s really like how we’re different. I have a lot of skepticism about business coaches and mentors, and I’ve hired many, many over the years. I’ve spent well over $2 million on business mentorship and coaching. And my skepticism is always grounded in the fact that they’re telling you how great everything is in their life, but they never actually tell you what their mistakes are. And so something that we’re very particular about is sharing what are the biggest mistakes that I’ve made, that the mentors have made. Because I want you to know these are real people who’ve had to go through the struggle themselves and come out the other side, and now they’re successful so that they can actually help you, too. So over time, because this is an empirical, scientific process, the program just keeps getting better and better and better. When I started off, I was just teaching half a dozen other gym owners what I did. And then out of that half a dozen, you know, one or two emerged who took what I had built and just refined it a little bit, did it better and got a better outcome.

Chris Cooper (14:32):
And then they taught the next generation, which was about 50 gym owners, and that generation you know, one or two rows above everybody else, took the systems, improved them even further, and got better results. And so now, you know, 10 years, 10 generations into this, the results that our clients are getting are results that either took me 10 years or they’re so great that I could never have even dreamed they were possible when I started my gm. You know, we’re producing millionaires—two to three every single month now. There were no millionaires in fitness when we started. And so it’s really this process of constant improvement, constant evaluation, proof, data and empathetic mentoring that keeps producing better and better and better gyms that are really on the cutting edge of success. So here’s maybe the biggest question or the one we get most often.

Chris Cooper (15:19):
“You publish all this stuff for free. If I took all of your books and all the free materials and all the emails and just did them, I would be successful, right? Like there’s no secrets out there?” And we do try to make our free guides even clearer and clearer and clearer so you have action steps. You know, “Follow this checklist and go.” But the reality is that without that objective viewpoint, that person who’s our friend, like they’re close to us, they care about us, but they’re not us,. and they’re not in our gym, without that person helping us, it is very hard to take action on stuff. It’s easy to procrastinate on doing the hard things, or it’s easy to delay because “I don’t know how to set up Facebook ads. I don’t have time to learn it. I’m not gonna do it.”

Chris Cooper (16:02):
That’s where really having a mentor helps. And you know, earlier I said like, I’ve got this massive company. I still have mentors. I work with some mentors one on one. I work with some mentors who are specialists or coaches like for a very short period of time. And I’m always trying to improve because what’s holding me back is the same thing that holds every entrepreneur back. It’s me, right? It’s themselves. It’s like what they don’t do. So it’s really common in entrepreneurs right now to try and read 50 books a year. But after reading those 50 books, most of them couldn’t tell you how their business is better or how they’re actually making any more money. And that’s the difference. A mentor forces you to take action, holds you accountable, removes roadblocks, and kind of shows you the next level, right? Their inspiration, their empathy, their knowledge, their experience.

Chris Cooper (16:54):
And quite often, you know, when you’re faced with like, “okay, I don’t really know what to do today,” or you find a week has gone by and you haven’t done anything to grow your gym, it’s not lack of knowledge. It’s overwhelm. And so a mentor cuts right through that. And that’s why we say “when you buy mentorship you’re buying speed.” Ultimately. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. You know, my lowest point in gym ownership came at a point where I said, “Okay, look: I think I’m smart enough to figure this out, right? I’m hardworking enough but my gym is still not growing. There must be some other element.” And that element is mentorship. In fact, it’s possible to be too smart and second-guess every single thing, you know, become really cynical as you’re trying to find fault with all the potential mentors out there, and you eventually never get anywhere.

Chris Cooper (17:39):
In fact, if you look at free public Facebook groups, you’ll find there are people in those groups who are very cynical. They’re critical of business mentors and business coaches, and they hate everything. And their own gym isn’t doing well. And that’s not because they’re correct. It’s because they can’t get outta their own way. And they’re usually very smart, very intelligent people who just cannot trust people enough to allow their gym to grow. And that’s really at the root of it. So here’s a common concern: “I don’t wanna raise my rates.” And, you know, it’s really common because in the gym industry, most gyms are charging way too little. You know, there are some outliers who are charging what coaching is actually worth, but more than the average are charging little. And they’re doing that because they found their passion for CrossFit or Pilates or whatever at another studio that was charging too little. And the founder of that studio got their passion for Pilates, CrossFit, jiu-jitsu from somebody else who was charging too little. And so you started this kind of downward cascade of pricing. And really a coaching business should be charging, you know, quite a bit more—it is probably above $250 per month. Now, a lot of you are gonna feel like “whoa, I’m never gonna charge that.” But the reality is, like, that should be your ARM, your average revenue per member. And so the way you boost your average revenue per member up is you give the people who want more more, and you charge for that. So when people come in to RampUp, we never ever tell people to raise their rates. In RampUp, it doesn’t matter what their rates are—even if that’s like the easiest, obvious fix, we don’t tell them to do that because it’s challenging for them.

Chris Cooper (19:23):
Instead, what we wanna do is help them prove to themselves that they’re worth more first. Okay? An investment in mentorship is an investment in your business, but it’s also an investment in yourself. And one of the things that you need to do is understand your worth. We wanna prove that to you. So what we generally start off with is adding a valuable service—maybe it’s to the front end of your business, maybe it’s to your existing clients, whatever, maybe it’s like an upgrade option—and letting you, coaching you, to sell that to five people. So we craft it with you. We make sure that you find a lot of value in it—that you would pay for it yourself if you had the money—and we help you make it a compelling offer. And then you offer it to people. And when you sold five of them, this light bulb goes off like, “Whoa, people actually will pay me for this. They want it. It’s valuable to them.” And once you’ve done that, now you’ve kind of reached a new level of maturity as an entrepreneur, and you’re a couple levels away from actually raising your rates and feeling confident. The last thing that we want you to do is put you in a risky position where you stand to lose something through mentorship. We wanna make some gains first, create some margin, some buffer so that when it is time to make a more drastic change, like a price increase, for example, you have the buffer to do it and withstand it. And it’s not gonna be scary because it could potentially be fatal, right? Eventually, a lot of gym owners do wind up raising their rates, but I don’t want you to do it until you’re comfortable. I don’t want you to do it until you’ve proven that people will pay for a higher rate, for more value, and you’ve proven it to yourself.

Chris Cooper (20:56):
That’s really the key here. Finally, how do we choose your mentor? So when you book a call with our in intake team, Matt or Cody or Ashley will talk to you about your goals, and they’ll ask you about your metrics, and they’ll talk to you about your history. But what they’re really doing is assessing your personality. And these are experts who have gotten really good at this over the years. And so what they’ll do is say “this person will respond best to a high-touch, high-accountability mentor,” or “this person is very smart, but she gets in her own way. And so she’ll respond best to a mentor who simplifies things down to one fine point and says, ‘Just do this and text me by Friday.’” Or whatever. Like, there’s a thousand variations here. And so the intake team, if they invite you to mentorship, will also make recommendations to our success team.

Chris Cooper (21:47):
And so you’ll get through your intake, and the success team will take over from there, and they’ll say, “Okay, you know, based on your preferences, your personality, where your business is and what type of coaching you respond best to, we recommend one of these two mentors.” Or they might have a, a clear and obvious favorite, and they’ll say, “I recommend, you know, Gary or Jolene or whatever.” And then they’ll book you on a call with them. Now, of course, as I said earlier, you can always change, but the client success team knows so well who is gonna get the best results out of you that I would trust their judgment a hundred percent of the time. And it’s very rare that people switch mentors in Two-Brain, but it’s always an option. If somebody wants to, that’s not a problem.

Chris Cooper (22:29):
So those are the most common questions that we get about mentorship. You could apply these questions and these answers to the best mentors in the world. That’s why Two-Brain is the best and largest mentorship practice for gym owners in the world. Because we take these best practices that very few people are doing and apply them to the gym industry like nobody else is. I hope that helps. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Do you have other questions? Just go to Gymownersunited.com. That’s our free Facebook group. We deliver value in there every single day, and you can ask us anything. Take care.

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