Chris Cooper's Blog, page 72

How I Ran Fitness Competitions and Worked for $0 an Hour

I lost thousands of dollars running fitness competitions.

But I didn’t realize it at the time.

As a new gym owner, this was my plan:

Run a fitness competition, do all the planning and organization myself, ask for volunteer support, and make a few thousand dollars.

I saw this as a path to pure profit.

We did sell out most events, and we did end up with a little profit after we subtracted the cost of prizes and a few other things.

But I left labor out of my calculations.

I’m forever grateful to the volunteers who helped with scoring, judging and other duties. Most events—in any realm—succeed with a lot of volunteer help, and organizers would do well to over-thank the people who donate time out of the goodness of their hearts.

But I’m embarrassed to say my staff members also donated time. And I definitely didn’t account for my own hours—probably over 100 in any event.

If I go back and pay all those hours out at a too-low rate of $20, every single event would have actually cost me a lot of money.

Let’s be clear: If you don’t account for staff and owner time, you aren’t really running a business. You and your staff are volunteering. You’ve all got an expensive, time-sucking hobby that involves hosting fitness competitions.

I Can’t Believe I Missed This

The situation gets worse if I think about all the things my staff and I could have done with the time we spent volunteering at events we thought we were running for profit.

Let’s say we all spent 200 hours total putting on one event.

What if I had devoted 50 hours to using Affinity Marketing tactics to generate personal training without spending money on advertising? I bet I could have sold 150 hours of PT at the too-low 2009 rate of $50 an hour. That’s $7,500 gross.

From that, I could have paid out 4/9ths to cover service delivery, leaving $4,200. If I had used that remainder to pay myself for the 50 hours it took to sell the PT sessions, I would have made $84 an hour. or I could have paid myself $50 an hour ($2,500), leaving he gym with $1,700 of real profit.

In the end, I would have earned more, my coaches would have earned more, the gym would have been in better financial shape, we all would have had more energy to serve clients, and our clients would have had more access to top-shelf one-on-one coaching.

Oops.

Do This Instead

If you’ve ever gone down this path—or if you’re considering running your own event, do the math ahead of time and be sure to account for all the hours you and your staff will spend on it.

If you do, you might consider passing on the event and using those hours to generate real income with less drag. Or you might just cancel the event to get more sleep or spend more time with your kids.

If you choose to reallocate those unpaid event hours to actually growing your business, this is the key question: “How can I generate real income with less drag?”

Well, you could partner with a local event and run a prep course for participants. The time commitment there might be 20 hours at a great rate.

If you’re interested in that path, check out Chris Cooper’s exact instructions:

Whatever you do, don’t forget to consider the value of your time whenever you’re making any plans.

Remember: Your time is finite. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to spend it on the things that will generate the greatest return.

The post How I Ran Fitness Competitions and Worked for $0 an Hour appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Two-Brain Summit Preview: Jason Khalipa and Virtuosity in the Gym Business

Chris Cooper (00:01):
Jason Khalipa is a microgym legend. He first rose up in popularity through CrossFit after winning the 2008 CrossFit Games and was featured in the subsequent documentary called “Every Second Counts.”
That’s where I became a fan, and I wrote my first blog post about Jason around 2009. It was called “You Owe Jason Khalipa 20 Bucks.” And I was talking about the value of having inspirational role models within the CrossFit community At the time, Jason was definitely one of the first, but over time he evolved to become a role model as a business leader, too. He opened up multiple locations. He started his online programming company, and he expanded into corporate offices, delivering his methodology called NCFIT inside those big corporations. And he expanded worldwide with that. When things happened a couple of years ago and we went into lockdowns, Jason’s business changed, and so did his perspective. And so today we’re gonna talk about what’s changed. We’re also gonna talk about what he’s gonna be speaking about at Summit 2023 in Chicago, June 3 and 4: business virtuosity—what that means and how he’s gonna deliver that. He’s also speaking on the Coaches Stage. And so he’s gonna be talking about what he’s gonna be teaching your coaches about better delivery, what he’s gonna share with you to help make your coaches better overall, and just how to grow your business through virtuosity. So, Jason, welcome!

Jason Khalipa (01:26):
Ah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It’s great connecting again.

Chris Cooper (01:29):
I’m thrilled, man. So what I’d love to do is start with you painting a picture of where you were in 2020 compared to where you are now. And then let’s talk about like the evolution of NCFIT, and maybe we can share a couple of lessons, and then we’ll talk about Summit and all that other stuff, too.

Jason Khalipa (01:48):
Yeah, lots of lessons. You know, I think any entrepreneur, any business owner who says, like, “There’s been no lessons learned,” I mean, they’re not taking enough risk or doing something ‘cause I have plenty of them to talk about. So, yeah, I mean, in 2020, you know, our business, so our business was—I started the company in 2008. It was originally called CrossFit Santa Clara. We then started to open up multiple locations. We’re like, “Hey, we should have one brand to really get behind. It’s kind of tough to have, you know, CrossFit, Santa Clara, CrossFit Mountain View, CrossFit “this.” So then we rebranded to NorCal CrossFit, and we went with that brand for a long time. Then over time we realized, “Hey, we want to be more in control of our future and our destiny and our brand.” And it wasn’t that we weren’t pro CrossFit. We just wanted to have a brand that could stand on its own and not be NorCal CrossFit. And we were also offering a variety from programs, and not just CrossFit at the time. So we rebranded in 2016 from NorCal CrossFit to NCFIT, which represents NorCal and then obviously “fit.” And we did that for a while. And at the time we had corporate-wellness locations, which we still do today. We have brick and mortar and we have a digital arm of the business. So that kind of built up our business in 2020, which was corporate wellness locations that we have, particularly with Western Digital as a big client. We’ve had other clients, GoPro, Twitter, tons of ’em. But in 2020 we had Western Digital, and we also had Lucasfilm, which is, like, you know, Lucasfilm. And those were our big, big major corporate-wellness clients. Then at the time we had six brick-and-mortar locations that we owned and operated.

Jason Khalipa (03:25):
And then we also had our digital arm of the business, which we have two verticals of that. One is the B2B, which is called the NCFIT Collective—shout out to the NCFIT Collective team. I honestly think we’re doing it the best in the business. So if you haven’t checked that out, you should check that out. And then the other was the end user app. So that was building up our business in 2020. Obviously COVID hit, and especially because many of our brick-and-mortar locations were here in the Bay Area in California, we got hit hard, and we are just now coming out the opposite side of that where, you know, working with our landlords and whatnot. But we consolidated down our brick and mortar. So essentially where we’re at today is we still have the corporate-wellness sites. We still service those. We still have the Collective. Again, shoutouts to the team. We have the end user app, but we’ve consolidated down our owned and operated brick and mortar to two flagship sites. And then we have licensed locations. We have nine of those, which, that’s an evolving process as well. But right now our core focus is make our two locations here, Campbell and Mountain View, the absolute best. Like when we talk about virtuosity, which I know we’re gonna talk about, I want people to walk in here and be like, “Holy smokes! What these guys are doing is tip of the spear.” And then we’ll start to build back out the brick and mortar. So basically we consolidated down to then build back out.

Chris Cooper (04:43):
You know, I heard that quite a bit after the lockdowns ended in places like Canada and California—that, you know, the business trimmed right down to its most essential components, and they’re rebuilding from there. But better. What are some of the lessons that you learned that are gonna allow you to do that better?

Jason Khalipa (05:00):
Well, I think, you know, for a while we might have been, I wouldn’t call it like “fat and happy.” That’s probably not the right term, but that’s the closest I could get to it, right, is that, you know, generating revenue. You’re, you know, we had one of our locations in particular, I mean, you’re talking like a six-figure revenue monthly drop to zero for 13 months. And it requires you to really say to yourself, “Okay, you know, what is essential? What are we doing? Where’s the path?” And so I think what happened before that is because we were generating revenue in so many different ways, we had some locations that were performing really well. We had others that were performing okay, maybe some not even performing well at all. Through COVID, it allowed us to basically say, “Hey, we don’t have the luxury anymore of having this one location not perform as well. We need to consolidate down.” And so it was that. And then, you know, I also think what it did for us is that it solidified to our team that we looked out for them. You know, I feel like we handled it the most professional best way possible. Obviously it wasn’t perfect, but I feel like we earned the trust of our team because they saw the way we acted through adversity, that we tried to take care of them. And it allowed us to streamline our business to say, “Hey, this is what we stand for. This is where we’re going.” And I think for those reasons, if I had to say, COVID was kinda like a zero-sum game for us. I think on the one hand, we grew culturally. We grew. We set the tone for the next decade plus. So that’s a really good thing. On the other hand, we lost substantial revenue, and we had to overcome major financial hurdles. So I’d say there’s wins on both sides or losses on both sides, if you wanna think about it that way.

Chris Cooper (06:44):
What are some of the lessons you’re gonna carry forward? So you mentioned now you’ve been able to express your mission and vision and your care for your staff better. How will you continue to do that now? The pressure’s off a little bit.

Jason Khalipa (06:57):
Well, I think, you know, again, if I’m looking at it through the Bay Area lens, we were able to take, you know, five locations and consolidate coaches down to two. So we’re giving more trajectory for people who wanna make this more of a career for themselves. And I also think that we were able to refine our digital product more. We invested heavily into our apps, and I think that that’s gonna be scalable revenue for the future, whether it’s for the gym owner or for the end user athlete. So I think what we did is we consolidated things down that were taking up 80% of our stress but generating 20% of our revenue. And now we’re focusing on things that could generate 80% of our revenue with 20% of the stress by using scalable revenue models such as digital products. So those are things from a business perspective we’re doing, which could then put more money in our coaches pockets, which, you know, for me, when I started the gym, I’ve always been about this, and I’m always going to be about this. I wanna make a lot of money, and I want our coaches to make a lot of money, and I want our members to receive a premium service. And then I want to go out and I wanna go do philanthropic efforts. It’s like a really core culture to me is I wanna make so we could then eventually give. And we, you and I, have talked about this, and by streamlining the business and by looking for opportunities for our team, we can now make more to give more, which is really important to me. So that’s I think the biggest lesson we learned through COVID.

Chris Cooper (08:19):
Oh, that’s really impressive, man. So you also mentioned, you know, you were sitting fat and happy, kind of, you trim things down. And this is really a great segue into virtuosity. So can you maybe just tell our audience what virtuosity means to you and how that applies to business? Because I think they probably understand it for movement.

Jason Khalipa (08:38):
Yes. I mean, first off, I wanna acknowledge the fact that this is a working topic for me. This is something I’m really excited about. But it is a working topic. There’s a few working topics for me that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the fitness industry and how can we really make an impact on gym owners? One of ’em is this idea of demystifying that money is a bad thing to talk about. Another thing is this idea of virtuosity as a business leader, virtuosity as a business owner. And the reason why that’s so close to my heart is because for so many years I taught seminars for CrossFit. I traveled the world, and we talked about doing the common uncommonly well. The idea of virtuosity was just the cornerstone of what we were trying to get across because it wasn’t good enough just to do a squat. I wanna be able to do that squat with incredible mechanics, then consistency, and then finally start loading that with some type of intensity. And when you think about that as a business owner, you know, what are we doing in our business? Are we really chasing virtuosity or are we just chasing mediocrity? If you really think about it, right, if you’re a business owner and you’re chasing virtuosity, how many times have you walked into a restaurant or a business? I mean, at least for me, I know I’m entrepreneurial in this way. I’m sure you are, too. I respect the attention and detail. I love going into a Ritz Carlton hotel and just looking for the details that they’re doing that other people aren’t doing. For example, I love going into a restaurant and saying, “Wow, their attention and detail is on point”—the color tones, the way they deliver the napkin, whatever it might be. I’m obsessed with looking at how these businesses are doing the common serving food uncommonly well, and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do at our gyms is provide a premium product. You know, I walked into the gym this morning and I’m watching just people getting after it, but they’re doing it with the eye of a phenomenal coach in a facility that I think is world class. Can we improve? Yes. But the idea of virtuosity is I wanna walk in and be inspired by what we’re delivering and never settle. That’s the key concept there: always trying to improve that service for our members.

Chris Cooper (10:45):
I really like it, Jay. And I’m glad you brought this up—like, it’s okay to make money. Because when you and I were starting in CrossFit, you know, we would find the CrossFit message boards, for example, and if you said the word “money” or “profit,” a lot of the times you would be condemned for it, right?

Jason Khalipa (11:01):
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Cooper (11:04):
And how do you see the culture changing, especially in CrossFit, but just in the microgym community as a whole?

Jason Khalipa (11:09):
Well, I think the micro gym community, first off, I think what you’re seeing here is, I mean, if you wanna go way back, the conventional gym model, which I came up in—I started working the front desk when I was 15 at a conventional gym, and I learned a lot through that business. Then you had this, you know, for lack of a better term, call it “collegiate weight room.” So you had the conventional gym model and a collegiate weight room, and there really wasn’t anything in between, to be honest. Like, you had some group training of yoga and whatnot, but there really wasn’t anything from a functional training perspective. Greg came in. I think he really revolutionized the space as far as I’m concerned. He introduced the clock, he introduced the coach, he introduced these small microgym or boutique fitness centers. What happened is, I think CrossFit started to grow, and it was the antithesis of the conventional engine. It was complete opposite. It was low complexity, low cost, low coaching compared to high complexity, high cost, high coaching. Theoretically, what happened, though, is I think there was a gap in the market that was created. And I think Orangetheory, F45, Barry’s Bootcamp identified that gap. And they then service that market. And so what I think you’re seeing is that the overall ecosystem of boutique fitness is now evolving. And when people go into a boutique center, their expectation is also higher. It is no longer the grungy warehouse. I think that is the expectation for everybody. I think that if you’ve gone into an F45, Orangetheory, et cetera, you want to try CrossFit, your expectation is professionalism. Your expectation is cleanliness.

Jason Khalipa (12:38):

And I think that those things are also associated with money. So the idea is, over time, as the industry’s evolved, I feel like some owners have not evolved with it in thinking about it through the lens of generating more revenue to put more money in their coach’s pocket so they could have better coaches to provide a better product on the floor, which is a cyclical cycle. And we need to get outta this idea that a gym owner who’s looking for profits is a bad person. Without profits, you can’t give. Without profits, you cannot be sustainable. I can’t tell you how many gym owners I’ve talked to and their average take-home income is $2,000 a month. If that’s your take home, what does the retirement strategy look like? What can you actually provide for your coaches? And what type of service ultimately are you providing to your members? And how many lives are you really impacting? You know, not to go off on a tangent here, Chris, but just real quick: I remember years ago, this was like back in ’09. I opened up our second location. I’ll never forget this guy. This guy comes up to me, and I don’t know if I was at the CrossFit Games or where I was at, and he’s like, “Hey, you know you’re selling out.” And I got like offended. I got really upset ‘cause I’m like, “Who’s selling out?” I was like, “We have two locations servicing 600 members. You have one location servicing 50. I’m impacting 600 lives and 10 coaches’ lives. You’re impacting 50 people’s lives.” But it was, again, this antithesis of the conventional gym, where that model was looked at as, like, always about the money. And we were trying to be the opposite, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be about the money when also you’re trying to be about impacting the member’s life. And I think that’s where things got convoluted, you know, was kinda like the legacy of it. And I think it’s evolved, but I think we gotta do a better job of talking about it more and more and more like this.

Chris Cooper (14:18):
I think another way that it has evolved is that most of the people who didn’t care about the money are gone now. And I don’t mean to make a joke about it, but unfortunately, that’s what happened. So if business virtuosity starts with the owner making money, what are some other elements in the business that would lend itself to business virtuosity? What else?

Jason Khalipa (14:41):
Yeah, I think business virtuosity can be summarized as doing the common uncommonly well, so if you think about owning a gym as the common, which I know it’s not common, but it is common, let’s just say. You’re fired up on CrossFit, you’re fired up on fitness, you wanna own a gym—that’s common. Then now “how do I take that and level it up? How do I identify what type of front-desk procedures do I have? What type of coaching curriculum do I have to attain, retain and develop coaches?” Right? Those are some other things I wanna talk about to your team. We have a full system. You’ve seen part of it that I’ve sent over to you, but from the moment someone walks in the door to the moment they leave, how do you provide them a premium service that’s virtuosity for 60 minutes?

Jason Khalipa (15:18):
And that goes with the front desk. That goes with answering your phones, answering emails, front desk, coaching product. And then once they leave, how’s that follow-up process going? And those are the things that you could do as a gym owner to take you from good to great. And what I’ve noticed over the years, and especially for our business, is we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re not doing anything crazy. The way I’ve seen our business now rebuild coming outta COVID was just doing these common things that many gym owners are doing but trying to do them better. So an example would be when someone inquires for a membership—what does that process look like? We’re revamping ours right now to continuously evolve so that that experience goes from someone being like “oh, that was fine” to “wow, that was a premium experience.” And those are the little details you could go through that’ll have someone drive an extra three minutes to get to you, pass by another gym maybe to get to you, or to maybe retain that person for a longer period of time. So that’s what I mean when I think about virtuosity, and that’s what I wanna talk about to gym owners is that I think a lot of people wanna discuss paid ads. They wanna talk about the sexy stuff, right? It’s the not-sexy stuff that I believe is gonna help your retention and ultimately have more member referrals and get you to the place you want to be. It’s the attention and detail that I think is gonna get us there.

Chris Cooper (16:36):
That’s awesome, man. I’m really pumped up. So Jason’s gonna be talking about this at the Two-Brain Summit, but he is also gonna be going on the Coaches Stage delivering his message to the coaches, too. So, Jay, what are you gonna be telling them?

Jason Khalipa (16:48):
Well, so the Coaches Stage is something I’m really personally passionate about. You know, I’m not just an entrepreneur business owner. I’ve also been a coach for many, many years. I coached all of our classes for a long time, and I still coach regularly today. You know, when the schedule allows, I love coaching. I think the art of coaching is a gift. It’s the best time of my day. That being said, at NCFIT, you know, I’m really proud of our team and what we’ve been able to develop, and that’s taken a lot of time. And so one of the things I wanna talk about at the Two-Brain Summit is this idea of taking our coaches from wherever they’re at today—from good to great. And that ultimately I think is gonna be the tool and the resource that’s gonna help your business grow. So we’re gonna go over things like coaching scorecards. How do we evaluate our coaches? You know, if a coach isn’t scored, just like in a workout, if you don’t evaluate your time, how can you ever know if you’re getting any better? Now, you might feel better if you might think you’re better, but it’s also really nice and reinvigorating to see them on a coaching scorecard where your mentor, your leader, evaluated you to see that growth. So those are things we’re gonna talk about: coaching scorecards, the intangibles here at NCIT. Like I sent you the NCFIT 10. Like what are we looking for out of a class, right? Smiles and high fives, good atmosphere. We’re gonna lay out all those things. And also a self-evaluation form. You know, how do these people feel like they’re doing? And then how can we then check that on a quarterly basis? So my goal for Two-Brain at the summit is to really provide tangible, actual resources for gym owners to help take their coaches from a six to a nine, from a seven to a 10, from a good to a great, because that’s ultimately how the entire industry rises up. You know, what’s not good for anybody in the boutique space is having them go to a gym, any gym, and have an [expletive] experience. If they go into that gym and they have a life-changing experience, they’re probably gonna retain for longer. So if we as an industry can raise the bar, that’s something I’m really passionate about.

Chris Cooper (18:44):
You showed me a lot of the resources that you’re gonna be sharing at Summit, especially with the coaches, too. Like, so you’ve got the NCFIT 10—what were the other ones, Jay? These were incredible. I mean, you know, there was like an evaluation form, a self-evaluation form, great tool for coaches.

Jason Khalipa (19:01):
So this is, we call this our NCFIT Coach Field Guide. So at our gyms, the way our business works is that we have coaches that coach, and then in addition to coaching, they also support our digital resources, such as with our session plans and the programming. So we have a full team. And so the way that we’ve been able to create more of a career trajectory is by having them coach you 20 hours a week but then also support on our digital side. And the reason why I like that is that when you look at our programming and our plans, they’re written by coaches who are coaching, and it’s an entire team that reviews this process. Now we have handbooks and all kinds of stuff that are a little bit cumbersome. This one is a consolidated-down version of that. So the NCFIT Coach Field Guide is what we call it. Essentially it’s a consolidated version. We start off with the NCFIT experience, which is five key things, right? We’re gonna start off with smiles and fives—the greetings. So that’s our way of telling our coaches, “Hey, from the moment someone walks in, how are they being greeted?” Then we go to always engaging during class—coaches are always engaged, and we talk about that. That’s Number 2. Number 3, loud and fun, right? Music can move and inspire. We talk about that. Then 4: End on a high note. Coaches can make a great experience even better with a quick and powerful closing. Actually, sorry, that’s where we left off for those. Then we have the NCFIT 10, which is like our kinda mission statement for our coaches. Then we go into our scorecard. Then we have our coaching takeaway form, and then we have our self-evaluation form. Those are gonna be some of the ones I’m gonna talk about at length at the summit.

Chris Cooper (20:40):
Incredible man. I’m so fired up. And one of the reasons that I’m bringing my staff is ‘cause you’re gonna be there. Can we talk programming for a minute?

Jason Khalipa (20:52):
We could talk programming for hours! Yeah, I mean if you wanna see underneath the hood, man, I’ll give you the lowdown.

Chris Cooper (20:58):
Well, one of the, one of the coolest things you shared with me so far in 2023 was your prospectus, and I forget what you called it, but going through your programming kind of like vision. It, it felt like, “Wow, this is what CrossFit used to feel like to me.”

Jason Khalipa (21:15):
Yeah, thanks. I mean, we’ve gone through a lot of evolution from a programming perspective. So just to kinda lay some framework, yeah. In 2008, right, we followed Crossfit.com. We found that it wasn’t the best fit for our gym given the equipment constraints and this idea of three on, one-off rest. That was weird. We used to, anyways, looking back on it, it was not the best model. So from there we created our own model. We had our own, you know, CrossFit track. Then what we realized is that people wanted different levels of complexity. So we ended up rolling out, years ago, you and I talked about this in Canada, where we had a 60-minute class. We had a 30-minute class. We called it CrossFit, and we called it QuickFit. This is a long time ago. 30 minutes was—the idea was with less time, you offer less complexity, but you get in a good sweat and you move on. That was actually really popular. Then we realized, man, you know, you had 60 minutes, you had 30 minutes. We need something at 45 minutes to kind of hit the gap. And with more time, it allows for more complexity. And in theory I think it was good. But then over time we ended up just solidifying on two programs, and it just became confusing for our members. Cause maybe some days they can only come in at 6 a.m. but other days they come in at 7—they might be doing similar workouts because it was two programming tracks. So starting in January of this year, we went back to one programming track with a performance version and a fitness version. But they’re two completely different journeys for that athlete. And I think that’s the difference that we’re taking on. It’s not an RX and scaled. It’s a different journey, meaning we’ll adjust rep schemes.

Jason Khalipa (22:41):
Like, we’re basically looking at it like if they’re new or if they’ve been here a long time—or maybe even sometimes if you’re not feeling it. I’ll give you a good example: Fran, you know. Fran, 21-15-9, we programmed it here not that long ago on a day like that, which is pretty rare for us to program Fran because the stimulus it provides We have a nice, extended warmup. We try and get in a lot of bulk work. We definitely want people to sweat and feel like they accomplished something throughout that day. We’re not into the one RMs or things like that—just a single modality today. So they come in. You look at the workout. Performance would’ve been 21-15-9 Fran, right? Plus some other stuff. Fitness was a seven-minute AMRAP of 21-15-9 at like a 45-pound barbell and jumping pullups—or et cetera. Honestly, for me, I would’ve chosen Fitness for that day if I had done it on that day, which I didn’t do it. But if I had, I would’ve performed Fitness. Not because I couldn’t do Performance but because I wasn’t in the right headspace to try and get a PR on Fran. So when we look at these two journeys, they’re just based on “how does an athlete feel for that day? What are they looking to get out of it?” And if there is a higher complexity movement, we want them to feel inspired to get there but not feel like there isn’t a workout for them. So those are some of the things we’re doing. We’re doing RPE. We’re doing a lot of new things in 2023 that have been really successful for us.

Chris Cooper (24:01):
My head coach, who’s been a coach with me for a dozen years now, said she’s so excited going through the NCFIT programming that she can’t wait to work out, which is, you know, really exciting for somebody that’s been an expert for that long. And so I do wanna talk about when clients move back and forth between them. One thing that we’ve always struggled at in our gym is some days you do want to go lighter. And there’s other reasons why you might not wanna go full out. I can remember Greg Amundson telling me years ago that when he knew Fran was gonna be at the gym the next day, he wouldn’t sleep all night. He’d be so stressed.

Jason Khalipa (24:37):
That’s right. Just anxious, right?

Chris Cooper (24:39):
Yeah. I’m sure it must be like that for you. Like you, your best Fran must be low twos, and the pressure, right, to beat that all the time must just be … .

Jason Khalipa (24:48):
Yeah, I just wouldn’t even do it. Yeah, I’ve probably done Fran a hundred times. I just wouldn’t do it. And so we want—what’s really important for our programming, I think this is really important for any gym owner to think about what they’re programming is we are not trying to send necessarily, we’re not necessarily focused on sending athletes to the CrossFit Games. We want people to come into the gym and have a hell of a time. We want them to have fun. We want them to get in a good workout. We want them to learn something new. That’s really important to us because we are running a for-profit business. And what’s important there is consistency. It’s also important for results for our members, right? So we wanna provide them a resource when they look at the workout and they’re like “dude, you know what? I could do that” instead of looking at the workout and be like “I can’t do that. I can’t do that, I can’t do that. I’m not coming in today.” So instead, by having this Performance and Fitness track and promoting it to our members in terms of, like, it’s a lot better or worse, it’s just different journeys. And I think that’s been really helpful for us. So three things we’re doing as a team here at CFIT, we are assigning a type of workout to each workout. So we have effort, grind, heavy. There’s different criteria that we assign. So five different criteria. Then we assign an RPE—rate of perceived exertion. And the reason why we do that is take, for example, for today, right? So the workout for today is a 10-minute AMRAP of deadlifts and up-down box jump-overs for Performance. For Fitness, it is reduced loading and a different type of up down movement.

Jason Khalipa (26:20):
But the idea is that RPE 8. So what we’re trying to get accomplished as an athlete comes in, coaches, “Hey, guys. Welcome to the gym today. We have a great workout. We have an effort-style workout.” So they know it’s gonna be in that 12-minute range, give or take. It’s gonna be like a harder effort. We have an RPE 8, meaning on a scale of 1 to 10, we wanted to go at about an 8. So now the athlete’s saying to themselves, “Okay, so we we’re about this time domain. We’re about this effort,” and now you have these two different journeys you could pick to make sure you’re hitting that stimulus. And so what we’re trying to do is create a quicker conversation between the athlete and the coach to have them get the best workout for them for that day. And tomorrow the RPE might be 7. The next day, the RPE might be 9, but we’re trying to have our athletes base it on how they feel for that day and the effort level they’re gonna put into it. Instead of going off one-rep maxes or percentages. We don’t do that anymore.

Chris Cooper (27:09):
I love it, man. That so great. So I didn’t think I was gonna get more fired up when I was recording the intro. I was like, “I’m so excited to have Jason at summit,” but now I’m like twice as excited.

Jason Khalipa (27:20):
Oh. Three times!

Chris Cooper (27:23):
Yeah. We’re gonna have a hell of a time. I love it. And Jason, you’re also gonna lead some workouts in the morning at summit. This is the first year that we’ve done big, group, collective warmups or workouts. So I’m super fired up about that. I think we’re gonna have a hell of a time with that, too. And so my final note, man, this is probably the most important thing, is congratulations to you and your family on your daughter’s victory.

Jason Khalipa (27:46):
Oh yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Ava cancer-free. So that’s a very, very big deal. We’ll be in Europe this summer celebrating that. You know, and for any gym owner out there, there’s a few things—I wanna finish on the adversity piece because you brought it up. But just real quick on the workout, my goal at the summit is to really put my money where my mouth is. And if I’m gonna talk about virtuosity, if I’m gonna talk about the art of coaching, I want to go ahead and coach a class for you. And I want to show you, in my opinion, the level of care that we wanna take for each and every class. And so instead of just talking about it, I want to take you through it. And yeah, it’s gonna be a big class and yeah, it’s gonna be where I have to work with different things. It’s not gonna be perfect, right? It’s not in my own gym with my own members. I don’t know anyone, but that’s the reality of the situation. And so I think it’s really important that for coaches and owners who are going there, I would love to see you there at 6 a.m., and I hope that class fills up and we add a 5-a.m., and I hope that class fills up and we would add a 4 a.m. because I wanna be able to get as in front of as many people as possible to share the passion that I have for coaching. Because I want the entire industry to raise the bar. So hope to see you there. Now, real quick on the adversity piece: As a gym owner, you know something I get asked a lot is “how do you get your family interested in fitness?” And I think that if anybody around you knows you, they probably know you’re interested in fitness. And so if you try and go too hard with your family or friends, oftentimes you end up pushing them away when they’re ready. Typically, they’ll come to you is what I’ve found. If I push too much, it’s just gonna take another six months before they’re ready to come to me—that’s been my experience. But I think what’s interesting is if someone isn’t motivated by six-pack abs or better blood work or, you know, whatever. Those are all things that people, I think, know are associated with fitness. But the one thing I would add, if you’re ever talking to somebody, is this idea of microdoses of adversity that you’re intentionally putting yourself into. So when you walk into the gym, I’m actually improving my health and wellness through blood markers and the way I look in a bathing suit, but I’m also improving myself in between the ears, and I’m having microdose of adversity, whether it’s getting ready for a Fran workout or going for my best effort on a workout.

Jason Khalipa (30:00):
Those things are challenging, and I need to learn to overcome them through positive self-talk, through whatever I do in the gym. The beauty part is they translate really well into real life. And so just as a gym owner, as a coach listening, I think that’s something we don’t spend enough time thinking about. And we don’t need to preach about this hard, but that’s the best gift that the CrossFit Games or CrossFit has ever given me, is the ability to learn, look at it as a microdose of adversity and then how I’ve learned to overcome that. So when the real life did throw me a curve ball, I was better prepared to mentally handle it. And those are some of the things I think we could provide our clients. So we don’t really think about as much, and I just wanted to, you know, make sure I acknowledge that here.

Chris Cooper (30:41):
Wow, that’s amazing. So, Jason, thank you so much, man. I can’t wait to see you June 3 and 4 in Chicago. Everybody come out to the Two-Brain Summit, meet Jason in person. I mean, he’s gonna be around all day speaking, leading workouts and talking about NCFIT. Man, thank you so much.

Jason Khalipa (30:58):
Yeah, thank you.

Chris Cooper (30:59):
Jason will be at the Two Brain Summit this year in 2023. I hope you can make it. If you want ticket info, just go to Gymownersunited.com, join our free Facebook group, and we’re constantly posting stuff in there, including how to get summit tickets for you and your team for slightly less before a certain deadline. Gymownersunited.com. You’ll love the discussion in there. There’s 7,000 other gym owners in there, including me and my mentoring team, where we’re always just offering some guidance, some tips and some advice. We’ll see you there!

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The Super-Special Quarterly Events Calendar for Maximum Retention

In this series, I’ve been telling you about the value of running special events. I’ve told you what to run and how to make money, and I’ve shared some examples of great events on our podcast and YouTube.

Here, I’m going to give you a sample annual calendar with four events. Substitute any parts as you see fit—the template is just to give you an example.

Two-Brain clients: Click here to get step-by-step instructions, promotional materials, programming and everything you need to run any of these events (and many more!).

February: The Intramural Open

If you’re a CrossFit gym, you can do the CrossFit Open and add the Intramural Open on top. Thousands of CrossFit gyms have been doing this since we released the first guide back in 2013.

If you’re not a CrossFit gym, just run the Intramural Open: five fun, novel workouts for in-house teams.

Regardless of the path you select, start an Open prep group six weeks beforehand, and focus on skills instead of capacity.

Get our full Intramural Open guide by requesting it here (if you aren’t a member of the Facebook group Gym Owners United, join first and then request the guide).

May: Local 5- or 10-km Race

Partner with a local 5- or 10-km race. We use The Mountain Maple, a local event with incredible scenery.

Run a Couch to 5K group beginning in early April.

Something like this is usually great for new exercisers. You could also set up a novel event yourself, like a Midnight 5K or a Pump ‘n’ Run, as I shared in the previous post.

September: DEKA Obstacle Course Race or Local Spartan Race

DEKA events are held in your gym; Spartan Races are held outside. If there’s a Spartan Race nearby, your job is done: Just sign up your gym. Two-Brain gyms receive a ton of extra bonuses (including money) when they sign up their gyms.

Set up a 12-week obstacle-course-race prep course beginning in June or July to keep people training hard through the summer months, when attendance can dip.

You could also host a DEKA event and let people race through an in-gym obstacle course. DEKA provides scoring, leaderboards and awards, as well as some promotional tips. Two-Brain gyms get more, including referral commissions and rev-share plans.

Two-Brain clients: Click here for the full Spartan and DEKA plans.

December: Powerlifting, Weightlifting or other Strength Event

We do a Supermeet every year. Lifters have two hours to hit a max in the snatch, clean and jerk, bench press, deadlift, back squat and weighted pull-up. Their combined best lifts are their SuperTotal.

You can find a local meet, too. Especially in powerlifting, it’s pretty easy to become a national champion in one powerlifting federation because there are so many (and they frequently change). You can easily run your own event, or bring in a local powerlifter to be an objective judge.

Set up your specialty group at least eight weeks out. I like using a 5/3/1 program for these, but make sure you cover movement variations you don’t normally program in group classes. For example, teach the sumo deadlift, show people how to do weighted good mornings or teach people how to shorten the stroke on the bench press.

Keep It Simple

These are just four examples for a sample calendar.

I’m sure you can find other local events, or you can host simple events tailored to your crew.

Just remember: The more complex the event, the more time and energy it will take—and the lower your profitability.

Most people don’t need guest DJs or lights or even a remote location to get nervous or excited. Do just enough to make the event feel special and honor the participants. Make it fun, and prepare them to win just by participating!

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Special Events and Retention: 8 Simple Steps to Success

Running special events a few times every year can help with retention, client motivation and—sometimes—profit.

But most gym owners run events that create a ton of extra work, establish bad habits in their clients, create membership cliques, and don’t generate profit.

Below, I’ll tell you how to do it better.

Two-Brain clients: Get the step-by-step process in the Toolkit by clicking here (the package includes promotional materials, checklists and even programming for specialty groups!).

4 Events and 8 Steps

Here’s how to fire up your clients, expose them to new and fun challenges, and drive revenue—without adding a huge amount of work to your plate.

1. Pick four events to run in the next 12 months. If you can leverage someone else’s event to fill any of these spots, do it. See the previous post.

2. Make sure you have a balance of events, like a running event, a lifting event, a “fitness” event and an obstacle-course race. Don’t just choose four throwdowns.

3. Plot these events on your annual calendar, one for each quarter. Competing isn’t the point; preparing to compete is the point. You want people to have something in the future that keeps them motivated to work with a coach. (I’ll share a sample calendar with you in the next post in this series.)

4. Work backward from the date of each event to set up a “prep group.” For example, run your Couch to 5K group six weeks before the local race. If you don’t have a good local 5- or 10-km event, set something up that’s novel and easy. For example, we ran a “midnight 5k” for years, and we always got dozens of members to show up with glow sticks at midnight. Another option is a “pump and run”—every bench-press rep completed at body weight in one set without a break removes 30 seconds from your 5-km run time. Build your prep group according to the instructions in the previous post.

5. Charge for the prep group, but also charge for the event if you’re organizing it. Make sure the fee is enough that people won’t just shrug it off (usually $50 or more, including a shirt). You need to charge enough to make the experience amazing and pay your coaches.

6. Encourage people to sign up and train hard for the event. If they’re scared to look bad, that’s OK: Fear is actually a great motivator. This is how events can help clients get results and stick around longer.

7. Collect the revenue for the event in advance. Promote it before you promote your prep group.

8. Pay coaches an hourly wage to run the event if you’re the host, or recruit volunteer judges. Pay the coach 44 percent of the prep-group revenue.

Something for Everyone

Ideally, every person in your gym will be challenged enough to do one event every year. But people will want to do different events or different combinations of events.

The “elite exercisers” can challenge their fitness with the full series—maybe a powerlifting meet, a run, an obstacle-course race and a fitness throwdown. The beginners can pick just one, compete for the first time and feel great about completing the event.

These quarterly competitions are a great way to give your clients something to work toward, and people who have clear goals are unlikely to cancel their memberships. You’ll also create a series of opportunities to celebrate your clients, put them on podiums and make them smile. If you follow the steps above, you’ll see a financial reward as well.

The key takeaway: Do not just add more work to your annual plan without ensuring you are rewarded.

The post Special Events and Retention: 8 Simple Steps to Success appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

“This is Spartan!” (and DEKA): Joe De Sena

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Hey, friends. Today I wanna introduce you to an entrepreneurial hero of mine. This is Joe De Sena, and some of you have heard of him before. He’s the founder of Spartan Race. But we’re gonna get into a lot of topics that I haven’t heard in other interviews with Joe, and I’m gonna tell you why he’s a hero of mine. But first, I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and I’m gonna show you some interesting stuff that’s available to Two-Brain Business clients, but we’ve also got a ton of free resources. If you want, you can just join our free public Facebook group. Go to Gymownersunited.com, and it’ll zip you right there. I put free stuff in this group all the time. We do a free webinar every month. Some of my mentors volunteer in there to answer questions for free.

Chris Cooper (00:41):
And it’s just such a valuable place where you can talk about Joe and this podcast and the Spartan partnership and everything else that I’m gonna reveal as we go. If you haven’t heard of Joe De Sena, then here’s what you need to know. In college, he started a multi-million-dollar construction business. Then he started a Wall Street trading firm, and then he hung it all up and moved to Vermont, where he bought this little farm, and he set up this general store and a bed and breakfast for hikers. And while that business was gaining ground, he started doing adventure races. And so he would travel around and he would do these crazy races that involved, you know, every sport you can think of, climbing and canoeing and, like, you’d have to find your way with a compass. And they were pretty extreme. There were even TV shows about this back in the day.

Chris Cooper (01:24):
And then he said, “I wanna make this accessible to the masses because it’s exciting. People train for it and it could introduce them to fitness.” And so years later, the Spartan and DEKA empire now serves like a million people worldwide every single year. They run like 270 events in 40 different countries. And they’ve had more than 7 million participants from little kids to elite athletes to 90-year-olds since it was founded only 12 years ago. He still does a lot of ultra racing stuff, but what’s really interesting to me is how he organizes his business. Most of us can only be a good CEO to one company at a time. Joe has several. They’ve gobbled up a lot of their competitors, like Tough Mudder—they’ve just bought them out. They still offer Tough Mudder under its own brand, which is interesting.

Chris Cooper (02:14):
He started DEKA, which could be an entirely different company, and he appointed a CEO from within—Yancy Culp, who’s gonna be at the Two-Brain Summit to build up that program. DEKA is like an obstacle-course race and training program for gyms, and we have an amazing partnership with both DEKA and Spartan that Two-Brain gyms are really gonna benefit from. I’m so excited about it. There’s a lot of stuff—we’re gonna dive in here today. I think that no matter where you are on your entrepreneurial journey, you’re going to learn a lot just from being around Joe. He’s one of these people who you just like wanna immerse yourself in. You wanna follow him around all day and just soak it up. But without further ado, I hope you’re gonna get a lot from this episode. I sure did. And just the perspective of a CEO at this level is really important to insert into your brain at least every month. Enjoy. All right, Joe De Sena, welcome to the show.

Joe De Sena (03:07):
Thanks for having me.

Chris Cooper (03:08):
Oh, it’s a great honor. And I just explained to our audience exactly who you are, so it’s such a huge deal to have you here. But today we’re mostly talking about the connection between Spartan and gyms. And I’d love to hear, you know, starting with the history of Spartan, when did you start seeing gyms get involved? Was there a connection with CrossFit or any other brand?

Joe De Sena (03:30):
It was a crazy. It was a crazy thing that happened when we started this brand, God, 22 years ago. And its first incarnation, and I would say about 12 years in, so like, let’s call it 2012, it became obvious that the number one question everybody asked from any walk of life anywhere in the world, big, small, wide, narrow: “How do I get in shape for that?” Right? “I wanna do it, but how do I get in shape?” And so it became obvious that we were a feeder for gyms, right? Gym memberships would go up whenever we announced a race in a particular market. So very early on we noticed that it became a natural partner partnership opportunity with gyms all over the world. And in reverse as well, right? Because then those gyms needed a way to keep the members retained. And one of the ways gyms did that all over the world was to say, “Hey, we’re gonna train for this thing together for five months and go do this Spartan Race, and we’re gonna build a bond amongst our members and our trainers that’s unbreakable.” And that’s what would happen.

Chris Cooper (04:51):
Yeah, I literally saw that happen at my gym, too, where, you know, a dozen people drove about eight hours to do a Spartan Race. And, you know, they’re all still at my gym. It’s amazing. Do you formally try to attract gyms then now?

Joe De Sena (05:05):
You know, the only formal thing we ever did was, well, we did lots of little tactical things, right? We’ve had folks like Ben, who’s on the call here, run around and visit 50 gyms a day in our markets and knock on doors and hand out cards and just say, “Hey, just so you know, we’re coming to town. Big opportunity for you to retain customers and get new customers.” We’ve certainly had partnerships with the big gym brands all over the world. But during the pandemic, I think we were most formal where we said, “Listen, gyms are suffering as much as we are. Why don’t we give race entries to all the gyms? Have them use these race entries as a way to kind of reinvigorate their customer base.” So I don’t know how many millions of dollars of tickets we gave away, but it was good for them and it was good for us.

Chris Cooper (05:55):
So, Ben, the early days, I’ll let you feel this one then. You’re knocking on doors. What kind of gyms are you looking for that are most likely to participate in Spartan?

Benjamin Killary (06:03):
Yeah, we were we were heavily focused on CrossFit. We tried to partner with them any which way we could on the HQ side. And they were certainly, you know, very focused on their own mission, and obviously they’re as big as they are globally. But to Joe’s point, I was knocking on a lot of doors of—really any door in the market, heavily focused on gyms but really honed in on CrossFit gyms. And I’d hit CrossFit specifically. I’d hit maybe, you know, anywhere from five to 10 a day. And it doesn’t necessarily show right now, but I’d hit a workout at the end of the day with ’em, and I’d sweat with ’em and work out with them. And that really helped to form, I think, the bond between us and the gyms. And Joe, if you remember that summit you did in Pittsfield, you flew a bunch of gym owners in there, mainly CrossFit gym owners, and a lot of ’em were like, “Yeah, this kid, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he came in and he sweated with us. He seemed to care about the brand.” And I think that that helped forge a lot of those relationships. And it’s something that that we try to continue to get done today.

Joe De Sena (07:15):
I do remember that. I apologize: my dog just showed up. This little terror, this is Ernest Shackleton, and he does not need a gym. He is, this is the fittest dog on Earth, this crazy little dog. But anyway, I remember inviting all those CrossFitters up to the farm. I also remember one of our Death Races, we had a bunch of those CrossFit gym owners come back, and you know, it was early days for CrossFit. It was early days for us. And I remember torturing 300-plus people, including these CrossFit gym owners, by lifting. I thought it was humorous, you know, that CrossFit just like lifted weights, lifted weight. And I thought, “There’s just no way to get in the long-distance-endurance shape doing that.” Certainly you’ll get in great shape, but the stuff we were doing was much, you know, had longer duration. And so I tortured them by having them lift a rock. “Pick a rock at a certain percentage of your weight, lift the rock off the ground, put it over your head, put it back down.” Lift the rock, put it over your head, put it back down for six and a half hours. Up, down. “You guys wanna lift weights? We’re gonna lift weights.” It was awesome.

Chris Cooper (08:40):
I remember that. It was great. I could see how that would appeal, you know, to a lot of them—especially the earliest CrossFitters would’ve just thought that was amazing.

Joe De Sena (08:49):
Yeah, yeah. These were the, these were definitely the first movers. You know, early, early CrossFit that we had there. And you know, the funny thing is now years later, Dave Castro and the new CEO we just spent some time with, we’re formalizing a partnership with them. And it’s great. It’s really great because their footprint, their global footprint is as big as ours, if not bigger. So it’s just a great fit.

Chris Cooper (09:17):
Yeah, I think so, too. That’s great.

Benjamin Killary (09:20):
We’ve been trying to get that done for 12 years now. I’ve killed myself trying to get it done, and Joe and Jeff Connor got it done in a couple hours out on a course in San Francisco. It frustrates me to no end. Trust me, I was on a list early on where their head of their general counsel was sending me some emails saying, “Hey, you better knock off what you’re doing.” So I’ve seen I’ve seen a lot of it. So it’s exciting. I was telling Dan McDonald, a guy that works for us, it’s just really exciting to see it finally come to fruition after just so many attempts to get it done, so many back-channeled ways to try to get in and just get ’em to the table.

Chris Cooper (10:03):
Yeah, that’s really amazing to hear, Joe. You said that sometimes people would look for a gym, and then they would figure out, “How do I train for Spartan?” and that’s what would lead them to the gym in the first place. And that’s interesting because usually I think of using Spartan as a retention tool in the gym. Do you have any examples of, like, in the early days, people seeing Spartan and having that inspire them to start their fitness journey?

Joe De Sena (10:30):
No doubt about it. I mean, we’ve had 10 million people do one of our races somewhere in the world. And when you talk to folks, like I said, the number one question is, you know, “How do I train for this?” But most of them are just off the couch. This is their introduction to let’s call it “the wilderness,” right? Like just getting outside and doing something wild. And it is that pivotal moment. I don’t think life can change for an individual without going through a really tough, challenging, heated, you know, moment. And that’s what we provide. And all of a sudden you start hearing, “Hey, I lost 60 pounds. I’m back with my husband, I’m back with my wife. I gave up drinking. I gave up alcohol. I didn’t kill myself. I literally had a gun to my head but remembered I had the race with my team, held off doing it, and now I’m just doing these races.” Right? So like, it’s unbelievable, really. I mean, every day I send an email out that comes inbound. The other day was a young 18-year-old girl that was dealing with cancer, found Spartan. Just—it’s just unbelievable.

Chris Cooper (11:39):
Yeah, it’s really inspiring. Really. Early on though, I don’t know if maybe this was because the gym community just wasn’t embracing Spartan the way they should have, but you started a Spartan coaching certification. What was the intent there?

Joe De Sena (11:53):
You know, because of that question: “How do I train? How do I train? How do I train?” It became apparent in the early days that folks on the fence—whether or not they were, you know, deciding whether or not to sign up—wanted to speak to somebody that knew Spartan rather than walk into a random gym. They wanted to know “can you teach me, you know, how to do this race specifically?” So we said, “We’ve gotta come up with a certification so that for folks that are unwilling at this moment to cross the line and actually sign up for an event in their neighborhood, this is somebody that’s, you know, done does tons of races, understands fitness, can speak to them in a language that gives ’em confidence.” So that was the idea behind the SGX certification.

Chris Cooper (12:39):
What does an SGX certification look like? Like what’s the process?

Joe De Sena (12:43):
Well, we took a Dr. Jay who had completed a few death races, and I said, “I want you to make it the toughest certification on the planet.” The first iteration of it, no one passed the test. No one. We couldn’t get anybody certified. But he finally figured it out. He’s got a couple of thousand now certs out there. It’s, you know, two-, three-day cert. Lots of paperwork—or a textbook, I should say. Lots of physical, in-person stuff. And the folks that do it are incredibly passionate about not just the brand but the lifestyle of being a Spartan.

Chris Cooper (13:28):
Mark Divine’s new book actually talks about that first group and how nobody passed.

Joe De Sena (13:32):
Nobody passed. Yeah.

Benjamin Killary (13:34):
That’s a common thing in Pittsfield. Anything that happens in Pittsfield is not easy.

Joe De Sena (13:40):
That’s right.

Chris Cooper (13:42):
That’s great. So why should a fitness coach—be it the CrossFitter something else—why should they take the Spartan coach certification then?

Joe De Sena (13:51):
Well, I think, really, I mean, if you’re a good coach and you’ve been doing it for a while, you probably have most of the knowledge, right? But by having this badge, it gives this giant Spartan audience—and a Tough Mudder audience globally—confidence. Not everybody, you know—folks have figured out how to train for these races themselves. They feel comfortable just walking in gyms, but there’s a percentage of folks, and it’s a big number, that wanna talk to somebody and be coached by someone that’s certified in this language—an expert.

Benjamin Killary (14:25):
It’s from a business perspective. When I talk to gyms, the value proposition is installing a Spartan expert in your facility to handle all the questions that people are gonna have. Customer service. “How do I do this? What do I do?” It’s very powerful from that standpoint. And then it also does provide continuing-education credits for NASM and ACSM and some of these global powerhouse certification platforms. There’s just benefit there that they get—that they have to do anyways. And it opens their eyes up to something new, something relatively young, if you look at the fitness industry, right? And that’s the value proposition that I try to put across when I’m trying to get people to partner up with us and come along in the journey.

Chris Cooper (15:22):
That’s great. I think that having a Spartan Race on the calendar can definitely make the gym money, too, and we can come back to that a little bit later. But I wanted to ask that question before I asked about DEKA because it’s very easy to kind of confuse the two programs, right? So maybe, Joe, can you start with what is DEKA? Where did that come from, and who does it? And then we can come back to the Spartan certification.

Joe De Sena (15:49):
Yeah. You know, what happened with DEKA was I was in the woods in upstate New York. I was running a race, and there was a team of about 12 women running through the woods. And since it was single track, I had the opportunity to listen to their conversation. It was at a Spartan Race, and the conversation went something like this: “Can’t believe we ended up here. We had done the Spartan Citi Field, which is a little more sterile, right? It’s clean, it’s up and down stairs inside Citi Field. And somehow they got motivated to come out and do this race in the woods, and they were questioning their sanity. And I thought, “Gee, we do need an on-ramp, right?” We need something that’s hard because everything we do is hard and challenging but is a little closer to home. We’ll meet the customer where they are, maybe with the obstacles or equipment they’re used to. And so DEKA was born: 10 fitness challenges, 10 pieces of equipment, three different distances. And I have to say it’s hard as hell, but you’re not gonna see mud, you’re not gonna see water. It’s indoors. All times are kept from all around the world. So you can see actually how you do versus everybody else. It’s exactly the same. It’s a little more difficult to make a Spartan or a Tough Mudder exactly the same ‘cause of different terrain. And it’s epic. First one I did, I didn’t have shoes on, I was just kind of … . It was during COVID. I was checking it out. I got sucked into competing. I almost vomited at the finish. And I thought, “Gee, this is like, this is a short distance.” But again, it goes back to that CrossFit-style workout where it’s incredible intensity for a short period of time, and it hurts.

Chris Cooper (17:32):
Hey, Ben, maybe you can paint a picture for me of what is a DEKA Challenge? You know, I sign up for it, I show up, I have no idea what it is. What am I seeing when I walk in?

Benjamin Killary (17:40):
Yeah, I mean, we set these things up inside of conference centers, and we just ran our world championship in Atlantic City at the convention center down there. And the stations, it’s almost—I liken it to—when the elites are going off and everybody else is there watching it—it’s kind of like Tiger when Tiger was coming up and people were just flooded at one hole and following it from one through 18. And we’ve just got 10 different stations. It’s the same station every time. I don’t have ’em all memorized unfortunately. I should as a sales guy who should know every product. So Joe will probably tell me that after this. But the SkiErg’s out there, the rowing machine, the Assault bikes. We’ve got this thing called a “tank” that literally looks like a tank that you push and pull and push and pull. And they’re the same every single time. It doesn’t change. You do an exercise, you run, you do an exercise, you run, you do an exercise, you run. The running totals a 5K in the DEKA Fit product. In the Mile product, the running totals a mile, and in DEKA Strong, you don’t run at all. It’s just how quickly can you motor from Station 1 through Station 10. But it’s just a very linear progression from one to two to three to four, all the way through 10. Epic finishing experience. The energy inside is amazing. We’ve got a world-class emcee that’s been with us for a long time named Jeff Barton. And he just brings so much energy inside, and with the music pumping and everything going at once, the four walls and the roof really help it. Spartan Race, the sound tends to dissipate everywhere, right? This is just super high energy. It’s built for TV. You could run this thing on ESPN with 500 people in the building just because, like I said, the nature of “the Tiger effect” from one place to the other. It’s just super high energy.

Chris Cooper (19:52):
So what is the difference between the DEKA Challenge and the DEKA Mile? Joe, maybe you wanna field that one.

Joe De Sena (19:59):
Well, so DEKA Strong, not DEKA Challenge, DEKA Strong is just no running at all. DEKA Mile you’re running in between each one of those stations. So that’s the difference. If you could envision a running track around the outside and on the inside these 10 stations. Every time you complete a station, you go run one or two loops, come back in, complete the second station, run one or two loops, come back in. So you wanna basically vomit the entire time, which is awesome.

Chris Cooper (20:34):
You know, it’s great. So just an hour before we hopped on here, literally our clients are gym owners worldwide, and they were sharing their annual plans, and one of them shared their picture of their annual plan, and they’ve got DEKA Mile, and they were calling it DEKA Challenge. And there’s a different DEKA Strong, but they’re doing one of these at least every second month, if not every month—in a lot of months, I think. Well, how often?

Joe De Sena (21:01):
Yeah, I think we’re a host. Don’t quote me. I think we might have 600 of them taking place next year. 600 of these competitions and growing.

Benjamin Killary (21:11):
That’s without new clients coming on, right? Like we’re continually going after new affiliates to take a hold of this thing.

Joe De Sena (21:19):
But it is—look, at the end of the day, I think let’s go up a hundred thousand feet. Businesses, parents, kids—none of us drive towards our maximum potential unless we have something on the calendar. So we could go in the gym each and every day and go through the motions. I went through the motions this morning. I can’t say I gave it a thousand percent ‘cause I went off into a corner and was doing it by myself. But if I know I’ve got something coming up, it changes the game, right? The way an Olympian trains for the Olympics versus the way an Olympian train just because, you know, four years from now he’s got something or she’s got something—like two different things.

Chris Cooper (22:01):
It’s interesting to me that something as challenging even from the outside as Spartan is so inspiring that it would make people sign up, go to a gym, start training so that they can do Spartan. What happens to them when the race is over?

Joe De Sena (22:15):
They’re depressed. Really, they’re looking for something new, and they’re signing up for the next race. We purposely designed our medals in such a way where they’re chopped in thirds and it’s magnetic, so you’re quickly looking for the other third. And the reason we did that was I raced for so many years—my mother introduced me to these crazy races back in the late ‘70s. I raced for so many years, and I found that during the race you wanted to take up ping pong and never do this again. And it was terrible. And as soon as you crossed the finish line, you were looking for the next event. And the science behind that is the brain releases just enough chemicals at that finish line so that it’s got another couple of drips of chemicals before you go to the next start line. It gives you a little taste before you get to the next start, right? So they call it “future memory.” It’s not only do you get it at the finish line, but you get it before the next start line. So you become addicted to this torture. And I say it in a funny way, right? But the reality is we need that good addiction. We are designed, our species is designed, to avoid discomfort, right? We are, we pay for gym memberships, and we don’t show up. And the reason is because our brains require so much energy to operate. Our brains subversively subconsciously are telling us, “Don’t do that. Don’t go to the gym. Don’t work. Don’t do anything hard.” Right? We don’t wanna push our boundaries. But when you do, when you have a date on the calendar, you have no choice.

Chris Cooper (24:00):
I saw that John Ratey was on your podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he once said something to me that as humans we need collaborative competition. How important is it to show up with a group and do Spartan versus just training and doing it on your own?

Joe De Sena (24:16):
It’s just like I described this morning, right? Like if you’re with two people, three people, four, whatever, it makes the experience so much better. It builds relationships that are unbreakable, but it also inspires you to go 15% harder than you would’ve went on your own. And if you don’t believe me, tomorrow morning, whoever’s listening to this, do a workout by yourself, time yourself and do your heart rate. And then the next day do it with two or three people, and watch what happens. Do the same workout. You don’t even have to mention anything to your friends. Everybody goes a little harder.

Chris Cooper (24:50):
That’s really interesting. So from single to group now, Ben, I think you mentioned affiliation with DEKA. How does that work for the gym?

Benjamin Killary (24:59):
The gym? Yeah, I mean there’s a whole program around taking the concept of DEKA and certainly in monetizing it you unlock the ability to host events at the grassroots level and license the name DEKA Fit and all the branding and things that come along with that. And you really attach yourself to a global fitness powerhouse in that respect. And so there’s a little bit of marketing support and several other key benefits that that small business really is able to attach itself to. Normally, I think you would, you know, pay a lot of money for that. And so there’s certainly, you know, equipment that is involved, like, because these things don’t change. Like I said, you can’t just put 10 random exercises out there. You know, the DEKA product is the same 10 exercises every single time. And a lot of gyms have this stuff, but there’s also, you know, certain things that are required from a purchase standpoint. They certainly pay for themselves, but the ability to host events and take that ticket revenue and anchor yourself onto a brand like Spartan I think is the big sell right there. We do put on our own events like the DEKA Fit—we do a world championship. There’s certainly in competitive fields with age group and elite and so on and so forth. But the majority of what’s going on, those 600 events Joe talked about earlier, you know, 595 of ’em are happening at the grassroots level. We don’t put on, you know, a full … .

Joe De Sena (26:47):
Think about why that is, right? If the three of us own a gym, we’ve gotta figure out a way to get new customers and fresh blood in every single day. How do we do that? This is a tool that does it. Up the street from us is a big place. I think it’s the largest techno gym in the world. The performance center in Lake Nona here in Florida. They have, I think they have 10,000 members, which I can’t even believe that now. It’s unbelievable. But they felt they needed DEKA as another way to bring people in to make noise. And it works.

Benjamin Killary (27:24):
I think it would. I think it would be—at this point, it’s pretty evident that if Yancy was in my place, that the whole world would know every last detail of DEKA right now because that guy lives and breathe it. And his energy is unbelievable. And I think, you know, in the future it might be worth it just to have him on just to talk about it for a full episode of DEKA.

Chris Cooper (27:49):
So is this a more deliberate evolution of what you saw in the early days, where Spartan was bringing people to gyms. And now this is more like the next evolution?

Joe De Sena (28:00):
Definitely the next evolution. This is definitely more of a targeted approach. But any one of our events does it. They’re big group events. It’s not uncommon to see 50 or 60 people at a Spartan Race or a DEKA together—a bunch of friends and extended friends. Or a Tough Mudder. And don’t forget those people post photos. They make noise on social media if they’re going to a specific gym. It kind of creates virality in that community. So every product we have is a gym driver. DEKA is a much more targeted approach.

Chris Cooper (28:38):
Okay. So Joe the big picture question here is like, where’s this all going? You know, what’s the impact that you’re trying to have and what are the next steps?

Joe De Sena (28:49):
Well, the big one is I wanna change a hundred million lives. I wanna get more people fit, happy, married you name it—off drugs not killing themselves, right? Like, get ’em through those tough challenges. They might be facing cancer, whatever it may be, God forbid. That’s the overarching mission of the company. From a business perspective, I want us to be all things hard the same way Louis Vuitton sells all things expensive. I want us to sell all things hard and challenging—the kind of stuff that you’ve gotta scratch your head and say, “I really wanna sign up for that.” Because it’s only the hard and challenging things in life that you talk about, that you remember, that become those stories that get passed on. We’re never gonna sit around two years from now talking about that time we sat on the couch and ate a bunch of popcorn and watched that show, right? We are gonna talk about that time we were in the rain, our car got stuck in the parking lot, we somehow barely finished that race. Those are the great stories. And I know this because I’ve been doing it. I’ve been doing it for 43 years.

Chris Cooper (30:01):
Well, I can’t think of a better place to leave it than that. So Joe, Ben, thanks so much for coming on and sharing the vision of Spartan and how it aligns with microgyms. 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 “This is Spartan!” (and DEKA): Joe De Sena appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

6 Simple Steps to Generate Revenue Using a Local Fitness Event

Running special events at your gym can boost retention.

These events can keep your clients engaged, and sometimes they can generate a bit of revenue.

But most often they create extra work for the owner, burn out the staff, accidentally instill bad habits in clients and don’t generate a dime of profit.

In this series, I’m going to show you a better way. I tell you how to run events with partners, I’ll explain how to run in-house events that make you money (and actually boost retention), and I’ll give you a sample annual calendar of four great events to copy.

6 Steps to Successful Event Partnerships

First, running events with partners.

If you choose a local event (for example, a 5-km run or Spartan Race), you can run a specialty program to get your clients ready. Your members will benefit, your gym will benefit, and, usually, the event coordinators will benefit from increased registrations. And the best part: You can even participate in the event if you want to—because you won’t have to set up or clean up!

Here are the steps:

1. Find two or three local events that your clients will want to support. Go for variety here: 5- and 10-km races are great, and so are Spartan Races and other obstacle-course events. But also look for golf outings or powerlifting meets. Don’t always try to find “the local throwdown”—but including one per year might help if you run a gym for “competitors.” (If you can’t find events you like, you can host them yourself. But this shouldn’t be your go-to strategy. More on that in the next post in this series.)

2. Offer a prep program six to 12 weeks out from the event. Promote it internally first, then externally. Ensure the price per session is higher than that for your normal classes. Choose one coach to run the program, and pay them 44 percent of the revenue collected. (Two-Brain clients can get the full playbook for several types of events—including promotional materials and programming for events such as Spartan Race—in our Toolkit.)

3. If you’re partnering with a local event, let the organizers know you plan to get them more registrations! Sometimes they’ll promote your program for you. This is rare, so don’t expect it; treat it as a surprise bonus if it happens. For example, we started a Couch to 5K running group for new runners who were preparing for a local race called The Mountain Maple. We doubled the event’s registrations. Ten years later, we still have an amazing partnership with them.

4. Collect the money up front and pay the coaches when the course is complete.

5. Show up for the event in force. Bring banners, sidewalk chalk and noisemakers. Be supportive and be seen!

6. Put the prep group (and the event) on your calendar for next year.

Run Your Own Event?

Partnering with a local event is so much easier—and usually more profitable—than running an event yourself.

But what if you can’t find anything local that you really like?

I’ll tell you how to run your own event in the next post in this series.

The post 6 Simple Steps to Generate Revenue Using a Local Fitness Event appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Your Gym Can Sell More Nutrition Coaching. Here’s How.

Mike Warkentin: (00:00)
This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” In this episode, Chris Cooper talks to Ric Thompson of Smart and Simple Nutrition about how gym owners can generate more nutrition revenue. Please subscribe for more shows just like this. Now, here’s Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper: (00:14)
Ric Thompson is the owner of CrossFit PTC, and the owner of Smart and Simple Nutrition. Ric, welcome to the show,

Ric Thompson: (00:21)
Chris. I am so glad to be here.

Chris Cooper: (00:24)
Okay, man. So here’s what prompted this. A year ago almost, we were at the Two-Brain Summit and we were talking about these numbers that we were seeing with nutrition coaching in gyms. And while 74% of gyms now have some kind of formal nutrition program for coaching, three years ago, almost none had. But still, only 4% of their gross revenue is coming from nutrition coaching. And I’ve asked you here today, Ric, to kind of help us walk through these numbers, what they mean and how gyms can fix it. So Rick, let’s start at the high level. 74% of gyms have a nutrition program of some sort. Now, why is it that they’re making so little money on it?

Ric Thompson: (01:02)
Because there just aren’t that many clients in your gym that are really interested in nutrition initially, and you don’t run a good nutrition program and you don’t have the right coaches in place to keep those clients coming back and staying in the program.

Chris Cooper: (01:19)
So, okay, man, lots to unpack there. Can we start with “you don’t have the right coaches,” let’s go there first.

Ric Thompson: (01:25)
Yeah, so the skillset for a nutrition coach is a little different than the regular coach. And what we’ve seen happen and what happened at our own gym was, we started off just getting, we’d run some challenges and then we would get a nutrition coach, we’d pay for them to go get trained somewhere or do something. And then they were either doing it as a favor or they were doing it as a side gig. And it really wasn’t something that they had a lot of heart for. And what we see from that is that then the clients don’t get the follow up that they need. They’re not making the right, they’re not achieving their goals. They’re living on some kind of a meal plan or they’re going from challenge to challenge and they’re just not hitting their goals. And then so they’re out of the program. And so your nutrition coach is different from your coach on the floor. The ability to have a lot of follow up, the ability to do things like motivational interviewing, the ability to do things like working on actual behavior change and not just, Hey, is your squat low enough? Or, are you engaged in your lats on that toes to bar?

Chris Cooper: (02:38)
So it’s skill, but is it also incentive? With 4% revenue coming in, I must think the coaches just aren’t getting that much work.

Ric Thompson: (02:47)
Exactly. So a lot of things that we did wrong, we started off, we charged just like everybody else anyway, on your regular rates. We charged way too low for our nutrition program. And that plus the fact that nutrition clients come in once, twice a month, maybe once a week. To get them the book of business. If you had 20 clients that are doing nutrition and they’re only meeting for a half hour and that’s once a month, then you’re only being able to give that nutrition coach 10 hours of work. So you really can’t keep them gainfully employed as just a nutrition coach.

Chris Cooper: (03:25)
And is that really up to the coach to make that number go up or is it up to the affiliate owner, or what’s the problem here? Why such a big gap?

Ric Thompson: (03:33)
Both. Both. So the coach, if they’re losing clients, just like on your gym basis, if you’re not getting people coming back in, then as you lose ’em, then your numbers drop. But it’s also selling the program a little bit. It’s getting the information out, giving people examples. We’ve done things like run challenges as a feeder program to try to get people into the nutrition programs. And so that’s something that has been super helpful, but it’s still being able on a single gym basis, even if you had 20 or 30%, which would be a very big number, you just don’t have enough clients there really to keep a full-time nutrition coach employed.

Chris Cooper: (04:17)
Oh, man. So that’s a big statement. With 74% of gyms doing this and the average gym only making 4% of their gross from nutrition coaching, I can see why gym owners would be tempted to do other stuff instead. They prioritize selling access, which is 6% average gross, or a kids’ program. Again, like 6% average gross. So why should they stay the course, Ric? Why should they keep focusing on this nutrition coaching? That sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of revenue coming in.

Ric Thompson: (04:49)
Well I think it was you, Cooper, who said it before, but if we all believed that nutrition was the base of the pyramid, we would all have a nutrition business with a gym out back instead of a gym with a nutrition business out back. I think you said that a few times.

Chris Cooper: (05:05)
Yeah, that was me. Thank you.

Ric Thompson: (05:07)
But I think that we all realize that our best clients are the ones that see results. And they see results when they’re working on both nutrition and movement as well as sleep and recovery, all those other pieces to it. But when those clients are fully engaged like that, they’re our best clients and we wanna see ’em keep going and we all know that that’s a part of it. And trying to get our clients to believe that is a big part of it as well.

Chris Cooper: (05:36)
Alright, so let’s say that you’re running a gym. You’re making a thousand bucks a month on nutrition coaching, but you’re also paying for certifications and you’re trying to keep your staff engaged. Maybe they’ve got their own mentor or whatever. How do you change the tide here? What do you do, Ric?

Ric Thompson: (05:56)
So, I mean, kinda self-serving here. So what we’ve done is we’re going out and saying, okay, just like hiring a VA, if you could hire a stand in coach, a coach that works for you is part of your gym but just isn’t there, then you can sell it kind of like retail. You can make it match where it fits into your program and then have that, and then you’re gonna make a profit off of that. But you don’t have to be engaged in keeping that nutrition coach, keeping their book full. You don’t have to be engaged in trying to manage their payroll. You don’t have to be engaged in trying to manage their time at the gym. Do I have a separate place for them to meet? Do I have all those different things that are just gonna cost you time and effort?

Ric Thompson: (06:43)
So I mean, that’s kind of how we’ve gone about it. But I think if you’re gonna do it on your own, that one of the things to do is,you’re trying to get that nutrition coach to be fully engaged in nutrition, and then they have to engage your clientele. So they have to engage your clients. They have to be sending information, putting information out to them. They have to be interested in running challenges. They have to be interested in how they’re performing. But they also have to be able to be interested in the people. So that’s kind of the key piece there. The more that they’re engaged and the more that you talk about nutrition, the more that you bring nutrition in, that you show that you do nutrition by having whether signage or posts, those kinds of things. That’s the only way to kind of keep it front of mind. Because I think we all know none of us went into the gym for a nutrition program, even though that may be what we need. And I think that might be another Coop quote that I’m just throwing out there.

Chris Cooper: (07:49)
That one’s all you. Yeah, you can take responsibility for that, man. I mean, you named off a couple of expenses that come with nutrition coaching that most of us forget about. And we did our expense audit in December. It was like, Hey, why are we still paying for this big Zoom account? We don’t actually need that anymore. And I think some gyms might actually be underwater when it comes to offering a nutrition program, they’re losing money on it. So how does your program work, Ric? How does Smart and Simple Nutrition actually solve this?

Ric Thompson: (08:19)
So we work just like we’re one of your employees. So if you sell a program, say you’re selling your intro or your On-Ramp program has a nutrition component to it. So if you add that in, then what happens is once your client signs up, they sign up for us as well and we meet with them on nutrition via Zoom, and then we feed all that information back as well. We share information back and forth. And our goal is really, as a gym owner, I wanted somebody that was gonna work with us. I didn’t wanna work against somebody else, and I didn’t wanna have somebody in a position that they’re gonna try to steal your clients. I didn’t wanna have somebody in a position where they had separate interests.

Ric Thompson: (09:07)
So we have a common interest for that client to do well. So again, the simple piece to it is it’s really as much as once they sign up with us, we do an intro call with them and then start working with them on simple habits. I mean, it’s really a habits-based approach. It’s not an “Eat this, not that” program. It is habits-based. It is motivational interviewing based, it is behavior change based. And we can work with clients that are, we’re agnostic to if they are vegan, carnivore, keto. If they were all carb, I guess that would be hard.

Chris Cooper: (09:48)
All carb?

Ric Thompson: (09:49)
We’re really agnostic as to what method of nutrition that they’ve already had as a background coming in.

Chris Cooper: (10:00)
Okay. I’m gonna ask you to walk me through it step by step in a moment, but you actually highlighted another big issue. So there are some outlier gyms where their nutrition program really takes off and their nutrition coach just crushes it. And what I’ve seen, and I can name three specific examples, is that Coach is like, well, all these clients are mine, I’m leaving. And the gym loses revenue. And sometimes they lose clients because that nutrition coach is like, I’m just gonna go on my own. Now they’ve, I don’t want to use the term stolen their audience from the gym, but really the gym is like, who’ve fed them all the clients. This is a real risk, you know? It happens. So Ric, if I’m a client signing up for Smart and Simple, let’s say that I’m signing up through my gym Catalyst, what happens?

Ric Thompson: (10:44)
So the first thing we’ll do is sit down and talk with you on what it is that you guys are doing, the talk about your different ways that you onboard clients. We’ll talk about the different long-term programs that you have, and then talk about how we fit into that. And so how we fit into that is, most clients will meet once or twice a month with the nutrition coach. We’ll also have things like an intro call that we talk to the client to try to get a lot more information. That’s usually about an hour. And so we try to figure out how that fits into the programs that you’re offering now. And then, so short and simple, when a client comes in and they do an intro with you and you sign ’em up, once you sign ’em up and they’ve decided that they’re gonna add nutrition to that program, then at the same sitting, you can sign them up with us in terms of just set, go ahead.

Ric Thompson: (11:48)
And all you do is you enter the client in and put a code in and then it’ll schedule an appointment and then we’ll sit down and talk with them. We’ll send them some forms so that we can get some background on ’em.

Chris Cooper: (12:00)
Where does the gym usually introduce this? Is it part of their on-ramp or how do they approach existing clients about using the service?

Ric Thompson: (12:08)
What we recommend is that you start as part of your on-ramp. And what we’ve done is we put it into the packages, just some of the packages that we offer. So whether it’s a a five or eight or 12 PT sessions or all PT or something like that, what we do is we offer that with a nutrition and a non-nutritive option. And so when someone does that, so I mean, those are just the packages that we offer and we kind of suggest something similar. And so once you talk to the value of the client on that, then they can bring that right in as part of that intro process for existing clients. The way that we’ve seen to build awareness is to run a challenge or there’s all kinds of different ways.

Ric Thompson: (13:04)
Kickstart, we ended up calling it a kickstart challenge. But doing all those different things where we do a six or an eight week type deal. And in that we have some different habits that we work on. Clients come out of that with at least the knowledge that, hey, there is a nutrition program. And then from there we’re trying to gain some clients outta that. So ones that have been convinced that, okay, this challenge is a little bit like going to a bootcamp or doing Biggest Loser or something like that. It’s not really sustainable in that form, but here are the skills and if you want some help going forward with that, we can provide that. So that’s what we can do and we can run a challenge with the gym. So a partner gym can run a challenge with us.

Chris Cooper: (13:55)
That’s great, man. I was actually gonna ask about integration. How do you avoid the feeling of separation that the client gets where it’s like, they come to Catalyst but they’ve got a nutrition coach somewhere else. How do you guys actually integrate into the Catalyst program?

Ric Thompson: (14:09)
Right. So your CSM or somebody from your gym will be listed as one of our coaches on our software. So that way they can go in anytime and find out, Hey, how’s Julie doing? How’s Bob doing? And so they can always provide that feedback back to whoever their PT coach is, or to the CSM if they’re just tracking everyone. And then we also keep track and provide feedback on specific clients right through a Slack channel or something like that as well, just to try to provide the information flow back and forth to the gym as much as possible. And we use Slack. We’ve messaged, I mean, I’m more like everyone else. We can use Facebook Messenger, so , all those things to get back and forth.

Chris Cooper: (14:57)
I’ve actually seen better communication from your staff to gym coaches than within the gym coaches’ communication themselves. It’s awesome. And here’s an example. So let’s say you are selling supplements, right? And you are an affiliate with one of the top supplement companies, whatever, Thorne. And so you’ve got an affiliate link and your client is working with Smart and Simple, one of the nutrition coaches on staff at Smart and Simple, and they’re like, you know what? A couple of months in, I just don’t think you’re getting enough protein. Do you think a supplement would help? Here’s the link. And they give out the gym’s affiliate link. To me that was just so amazing and just such a great detail.

Ric Thompson: (15:39)
Yeah. And we want them to be sold on your program. I mean, that’s the service that we provide is to help them be a better client for you and to help you get better results with them without having to provide that background. And then what I think that I’ve also seen is that, clients don’t really recognize, I’ve had actually a couple of them tell us, well, I thought you were just at the gym and we were just meeting via Zoom. So that was that. I mean, that’s their experience and whether it’s because of space or whatever, I thought you were just at the gym and we were just meeting by Zoom.

Chris Cooper: (16:18)
Yeah, I gotta send the Smart and Simple gang a bunch of Catalyst T-shirts. Maybe that would just completely tie it in. That’s so great, man. Let’s talk about legality because still, not every gym has this. And what is holding some gym owners back is just like, I live in Florida, I have to be a dietician, or I live in California, or, where they live in the world restricts what they can say as far as nutrition goes. How do you guys solve that problem?

Ric Thompson: (16:43)
That’s an awesome question, thanks for asking that. So we have an RD that is part of our staff. So, she provides supervisory service. Typically we don’t do meal plans, we don’t do medical nutrition, nutrition therapy. I mean, that’s the area of an RD and kind of all of us. Knowing when you’re in and out of scope is super important. So having an RD on staff, though, is super helpful because as soon as we have something that’s overwhelming or we need something that’s a little bit beyond, we can engage her and she’s willing to come on and help out with whatever that is. And she can also review stuff and act as a supervisory position. Like, hey, how are things going with so and so?

Ric Thompson: (17:32)
And review some of their progress and talk with nutrition coaches. We also try to stay out of the RD field as much as possible. I mean, it’s really about behavioral modification and that’s the line that we tend to walk. We also try to find out who they would recommend locally for things like, well, somebody’s has a little bit of an eating disorder or there’s something that comes up. Because a lot of the time, nutrition things turn into counseling and we need to be able to say, Hey, we’re outta scope. And hand that off to somebody like Bonnie.

Chris Cooper: (18:12)
Yeah, Bonnie Skinner at Level Up Coaching, that’s who we’re talking about. Ric and I are both friends with her through the Two-Brain Tinker program and she is amazing. Okay. Well this has been great, man. Tell us a story of a gym that’s been signed up and using your service. And by the way, anybody that’s listening to this podcast knows that we don’t sell sponsorships, we don’t sell ad spots. I’m just a big believer in Ric and this program and I think it’s worth checking out if you’re a listener to this show. So you can go to Smartandsimplenutrition.com while Ric is telling us some stories here.

Ric Thompson: (18:42)
Yeah, so our onboarding process is really fast. So a couple of gyms, I mean really what we’ve done in each case, we’ve just had a quick call, they’ve brought on a couple of clients through the web interface, just like a lot of other folks using something like Acuity. We schedule an appointment and then we start to see clients make a lot of different changes. One of the ones that I think is most incredible is you see, I’ve got a client that I’m actually working with right now. And he comes in and he tells you all these different things that like, well, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, and I love to eat and I don’t wanna make changes.

Ric Thompson: (19:35)
Well, why’d you sign up ? But over time, you see that he can make changes and he is starting to make some behavioral changes. But the thing that makes it good is when he says, yeah, well I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna do my PT session with Matt and I’m gonna have this thing, or I’m working on this other change that I wanna make. I’m gonna run this race. And you can see it gives us an opportunity to go back and forth with that different gym on what they’re doing with the client. And then that gives ’em an outlet too, because when you’re doing personal training with that person, you have that hour or that half hour or 45 minutes with that client and you can make some interactions with them between, but when you know that the nutrition coach is also working hand in hand with you towards the same goal, I think it builds a little bit better kind of community support for that client because they see a bunch of people helping to work for them or help them hit their goals.

Chris Cooper: (20:48)
One thing that I wondered about when I started working with a nutrition coach that was remote was, is this person really gonna be able to hold me accountable the way an in-person coach was? Because they’re not right in front of me. But the inverse actually happened. I find that I’m a little bit more open and honest with somebody that’s not right there in front of me, that doesn’t live in my hometown. Because it’s like, while my nutrition coach is not a stranger, she does live pretty far away and I can just be like, Hey Jen, I had four cookies yesterday. That actually happened, Ric. And I don’t have to worry about, oh, that person is going to see me out to dinner with my kids tonight and wag their finger at me having a piece of pie.

Chris Cooper: (21:32)
It’s really powerful to have that connection where the nutrition coach can act almost like a mentor. They’re objectively detached but still in the mix in the conversation. They know everything about you. So Ric, Smart and Simple Nutrition is the website, but you guys are also really amazing on social media too. It’s very positive and upbeat and happy. And one reason that you didn’t name, ’cause you’re too tactful, why some nutrition coaches are not popular is because they’re just kind of a rule follower, jailer, right? They’re not fun, they don’t make it something you wanna do. You guys really focus on that. Do you recruit staff for happy joy or how did you guys cultivate that?

Ric Thompson: (22:19)
So one of the places, when we started recruiting different coaches and because we’re a remote service, we have coaches all over. I mean, we do look for personality and we look for folks that have spent some time, typically our coach is a PN2 at least. We have some that have that were RDs that we’re putting in for the positions. And they’ve all had cool different reasons why they wanna do it. We had somebody that was working on a sports team that they were an RD for, for a college sports D1 team. But they’re like, well, I still wanna work on my skills and be better at interpersonal stuff, not just writing meal plans for the sports team. So we do look for people that are personable.

Ric Thompson: (23:11)
We look for people that have good follow up skills. We look for people that can be available for our clients. And they really have to have that strong desire. And I think most of the people in our field tend to have that really strong desire to see somebody succeed, and to win with the client. And then also understand that, hey, we’re working for a gym and we’re their staff. We’re just at a different place.

Chris Cooper: (23:40)
I’ve heard some people say that they actually started selling more nutrition coaching when they started working with you. Why is that? Are you giving them resources to help market or are you coaching them on how to sell more nutrition or how’s that go?

Ric Thompson: (23:52)
Yeah, both of those things. So we are working on providing more and more marketing resources so that they can make posts so that they can engage their clients. Again, so if you had a nutrition coach on staff with you, that would be probably something you would ask them, Hey, can you put out posts for social media? Can you do some of those things? And so we wanna be able to do that too. Put out stuff that is either already templated or make it so that it’s easily done for you. I don’t know how many times that I’ve heard people say something was done for you and it’s not really done for you. So, you know, make it easy. Something on Canva to just change, put your logo in or do something like that. And then try to do those things to keep feeding them with stuff because I mean, it’s a two-way street. It’s not like we’re just so sacrificial. I mean, it serves us as well. If you get more nutrition clients, then we get more business as well.

Chris Cooper: (24:55)
Yeah, I love that, man. Any place that you’ve got a virtuous cycle of value like that where if you do a better job, you will get more clients. I love it. And it just makes absolute sense to plug that into a gym. How do you broach the topic where, let’s say that you’re coming into Catalyst and I’ve already got a nutrition coach that’s been with me for a while. They’re struggling, they’re not doing very well, and I’m like, okay, you know what? I’m gonna go with Smart and Simple to really ramp this up and help our clients more. How do you tactfully broach that conversation, Ric?

Ric Thompson: (25:25)
I mean, you care about the person that you have on staff and they’re the person right in front of you. And I think the best thing to ask ’em is just how they feel it’s going. And if it’s working for them, because I think a lot of times they’re holding on because they think they’re helping you. And trying to have that conversation and like, Hey, we only have 10 people. You’re making x a month. Or, you’ve lost a lot of clients. Is this really what you wanna do or is there a better fit for that person? And it comes in two different flavors I’ve seen.

Ric Thompson: (26:12)
One is someone that’s already a floor coach or personal training coach, and they’re like, yeah, this isn’t really the thing that gives me joy. And then if it is something that, hey, I think that really gives me joy, then what I would suggest is that then they continue down the education process a little bit, maybe get a little bit better at some of their skills, and then they can either come back or, if you think they’re good, then tell us. Then we’ll hire ’em on, get ’em more clients.

Chris Cooper: (26:38)
Yeah. The cycle just perpetuates itself forever, Ric. That’s amazing. Yeah, and that is the case too. I know that you’re always looking. So if you are a talented nutrition coach, you’re very passionate about it and you just can’t get enough work, reach out to Ric through Smart and Simple Nutrition.com and he’s always adding to his team because they are really starting to blow up. Ric, man, congrats on your success there. There’s a meta lesson here, and that is when you spot a problem and you can solve it for other people, you deserve to be successful, and man, you deserve it so much.

Ric Thompson: (27:11)
And Cooper, I have to thank you. I mean, we were looking at different options and having somebody that’s in your back pocket that’s there to mentor you along the way and say, “Hey, I think you should do this,” that means a whole lot.

Chris Cooper: (27:25)
Yeah. Just so everybody knows, literally I said, “Ric, you should do this.” And he just took the ball and ran with it, and now he’s crushing it. And that’s a testament to your leadership and smarts, Ric. So congratulations, man. Anybody listening, just go to Smart and Simple Nutrition.com. You’ll get a good sense of what the program is, and just walking through it makes you wonder, wait a minute, what can I just hand to somebody and truly have it done for me? Right. I loved what you said about, it’s not really done for you. Some programs it’s like, you’re paying them to put the ball in the cup and they’re like, oh, I drove you to the golf course. Isn’t that close enough? You know, but, okay. Well, Ric, thanks so much for coming on, man. Any other advice you wanna give to gym owners about building a nutrition program?

Ric Thompson: (28:10)
No, I mean, go back to what Coop said a long time ago, that nutrition is still the base of the pyramid. People come into us that aren’t really, that’s not the thing that they’re not necessarily focused on. But when you realize that the best thing for them is to work on nutrition, to work on their movement, to work on their sleep and their recovery, when you work on all those different pieces and their mentality, the way that they’re attacking things, when you can work on all those things together, you provide a better value. You don’t have to do every piece of that to make it better, but when you’re the place that people go and you’re the resource, then you have a lot more value as a coach because they look to you for their coach. Like, Hey, which way should I go? And, hey, here’s another resource, here’s another resource.

Chris Cooper: (29:00)
Amazing. If nothing else, guys, this will improve your retention at your group or personal training sessions because people who get results stick around longer. And if you are unable to deliver the kind of nutrition coaching that gets results just because you don’t have staff or you don’t have the capacity or you don’t have the time to figure it all out, just give Ric a call, and he’ll solve this problem for you in a true done-for-you fashion. Ric, thank you so much for building this and thanks for coming on.

Ric Thompson: (29:25)
Thanks, Cooper, I appreciate it.

Chris Cooper: (29:28)
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 Your Gym Can Sell More Nutrition Coaching. Here’s How. appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The First 90 Days: Turn off Autopilot and Review Client Progress

To succeed as a gym owner, you must create deep relationships that keep clients around longer.

Deeper conversations—and more of them—lead to deeper relationships.

A short conversation at intake and then months of silence? That relationship is going to end.

Anyone can follow any program for three months, and too many trainers “set it and forget it.”

Earlier in this series, I told you that you must find out a new client’s goals, prescribe a plan to help them accomplish those goals, and schedule a Goal Review Session within 90 days.

Your job as a coach—a true fitness professional—is to guide a client to the right program for the right amount of time and maximize success with that program, then adjust it to ensure continued progress. Coaching is all about evaluation and optimization, and you can’t do that without quarterly meetings with every client.

Our data shows that the best gyms review goals at least four times a year. This regular system of feedback, analysis and new prescriptions is a huge separator, and it creates value for clients, who will see progress toward goals and long lists of accomplishments.

The value to the gym is obvious: Happy, satisfied clients with deep ties to the business are unlikely to leave.

Read on to find out exactly how to conduct a Goal Review Session.

Goal Reviews: Step by Step

Start the Goal Review Session with Bright Spots: What are they most proud of achieving?

Follow with this question: “Are you happy with the progress you’ve made so far?”

If they say “yes”: Move to the Affinity Marketing process.

If they say “no”: Work on a new prescription to get the client to the goal faster.

Example: “You’ve done a great job working out in our group classes. To make swifter progress toward your goal of losing 20 lb., let’s work together one on one so you get a personalized plan complete with nutrition coaching.”

Another example: “I understand you’re frustrated because you travel so often and can’t get to the gym. To ensure you’re moving toward your goals, let’s create an on-the-road training plan you can implement in a hotel gym or even in your room. I can provide accountability by texting you to ensure you work out.”

Words and Actions

If you claim to care about clients but never ask how they’re doing, your actions and your words don’t match.

If you ask how they’re doing but never change their plans, your actions and words don’t match.

If you ask them for referrals but don’t optimize their plans, you’re begging for favors. If you ask how you can help the people in their environment after proving that you can do it, you’re helping everyone.

Meet with clients regularly. Celebrate their wins, ask if they’re happy and adjust their plans to optimize progress. Get to know them, and show how much you care by putting them on podiums and solving more of their problems faster.

Even if you just meet with each client for 15 minutes to talk about anything, your relationship will improve. But if you meet with them and follow a precise plan to give them the best service possible, you’ll create strong bonds that will endure for years.

Design, deliver, refine constantly and build a relationship that lasts.

The post The First 90 Days: Turn off Autopilot and Review Client Progress appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The First 90 Days: You Sell Solutions, Not Workouts

A free trial class, three membership options based on attendance and a link to scoring software?

That barely worked seven years ago, and it definitely doesn’t work today.

To succeed as a gym owner now:

Every new member must start the client journey with a consultation.Every client must maintain a 1:1 connection to you.Every client’s prescription must be updated regularly.

In Part 1, I told you how to use motivational interviewing to go deep with brand new clients and set them up for years of training with you.

Here, I’ll tell you how to design a program and deliver it with excellence.

Solving Problems Step by Step

Here’s a shift you must make as a fitness coach:

You are not just selling exercise or a certain fitness method. You’re selling coaching, expertise, accountability, motivation, solutions and goal achievement.

That perspective shift changes everything.

People just aren’t coming to you for a style of training or your equipment. They’re coming to solve a problem, and you’re the expert who can help them do it. In most cases, they don’t know exactly what they need. But they know they need guidance.

So how you do you deliver a nutrition and exercise prescription to solve a client’s problems?

As I said in Part 1, you ask questions to find Point B—where they want to be.

After using motivational interviewing to determine a client’s real “why,” you must find Point A—where they are right now. So measure what the client cares about. If they want weight loss, measure their weight. If they want fat loss, measure their fat. If they want to gain flexibility, measure their flexibility. If they want to gain strength, measure their strength.

Consider a client who wants to lose 20 lb.

Use motivational interviewing and you might find out she wants to do this to be a role model for her kids.

She cares about weight loss, so measure her current weight to find Point A.

Next, map the path backward from Point B to Point A. Like this:

After mapping the process, prescribe the fastest path to Point B. Like this:

“Well, Alice, here are the steps you’ll need to take to reach your goal of losing 20 lb. To make optimal progress, you’ll need to exercise five times per week and follow a clear nutrition plan. How does that sound?”

Now tailor service delivery to the client. Like this: “Would you prefer to do your workouts here at the gym or at home on your own—or would you prefer a combination?”

Great coaches guide their clients by presenting one option at a time instead of overwhelming them with choices.

Next: “So you prefer to train at the gym. That’s fantastic. Would you prefer to do your workouts one-on-one with me or in a small group?”

Now overcome barriers, such as price objections. Like this: “No problem, Alice! If you can’t afford to train 1:1 with me all the time, we could use semi-private training. You’ll get a personalized training plan and close supervision from me while I help three other clients in the same session.”

Or like this: “No problem! Our hybrid plan might be perfect for you. With the budget you just gave me, we can do three weekly training sessions in a group, plus two personal sessions monthly and nutrition coaching.”

Then motivate clients by reminding them of their wins and showing them their progress. Call them when they don’t show up.

Along the way, track progress and adjust the plan regularly to ensure progress is always being made. Staff members at Two-Brain gyms meet with their clients every quarter to adjust their plans.

Game Changer: The Prescriptive Model

We call this process the Prescriptive Model. You can read about it in more detail here.

This model has been proven to help clients accomplish goals. And for the business owner, it measurably improves retention and average revenue per member.

To boil it down:

Find out the client’s goal.Show the client your plan to accomplish the goal. Ask “how does this look?” and then prescribe the solution using your pricing binder.Tailor the plan if needed and then start the onboarding process.Make sure you book a Goal Review Session that will happen within 90 days.

A lot of people miss the last step, but it’s an essential part of a client’s first 90 days. In Part 3 of this series, I’ll tell you how to review client progress, update prescriptions and keep clients around for the long haul.

The post The First 90 Days: You Sell Solutions, Not Workouts appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Red-Alert Retention: The A+ Plan for a Client’s First 90 Days

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Keeping a client around long term really comes down to how they start. The first 90 days is critical. And today I’m gonna share with you our first 90 days client journey from my gym, Catalyst. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if this is interesting to you, you can go to Gymownersunited.com and talk about it, ask questions in that group, and I’m happy to help. If you’re in Two-Brain Business, you can access the exact spreadsheet that I’m gonna show you and use it as a template to build your own 90-day client journey in the RampUp program or in the Toolkit.

Chris Cooper (00:36):
So today I’m gonna share with you the exact steps that new clients go through at my gym, Catalyst. I’m gonna briefly mention where they come from, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens from the point when they’re sitting in front of me at a No Sweat Intro. And every single step from there is laid out. The science of retention is really emerging, but what’s really, really important, the thing that really moves the needle for a lot of gyms, are the things that I’m gonna mention in this video. But the most important thing is that you have a plan laid out. And so if you’re in Two-Brain, use the template, tailor it any way that you want to for your gym, but keep the really important things in there that actually matter. There are a lot of experts out there who will tell you that the key to retention is this thing, but the reality is, unless it’s measurable, you don’t need to probably do it.

Chris Cooper (01:24):
And I’m only gonna share with you the things that actually work to improve client retention today. So without further ado, I’m gonna share this spreadsheet. Now, if you’re listening to this on a podcast and you can’t see it, just go to the YouTube channel and you’ll be able to see this all step by step. Here’s the start of this spreadsheet. Now this template is available only to people who are in Two-Brain, but if you wanna pause this and take notes and build your own, that’s absolutely fine. Again, the key is that you have something written down so that you can assign duties to your staff, you can check off a client’s progress, and you can notice when a client starts to go sideways and you’re losing them. So where our client starts, I use the example of them coming in through a lead ad on Facebook, and we teach this in our mentorship course, but we also teach three other marketing funnels.

Chris Cooper (02:10):
And so we want people to have multiple ways that clients come to them. Okay? In this example that I’m sharing here, they come in through a lead ad, and we’re doing sell by chat, and our only goal is to book an NSI. I included this on the spreadsheet for my staff because other people manage sell by chat. When people come in and they do a lead ad and they enter their information, I want my staff to remember the only goal of that text message conversation or even the phone call is to get them to book a No Sweat Intro. It’s not to sell them on the program. It’s not to list our prices or give all the different options. It’s to get them to book, period. And the success of that texting or that lead nurture is really just how many people book NSIs and how many people show up for them from there.

Chris Cooper (02:56):
Okay? A client books a No Sweat Intro, and then our only goal changes to getting ’em to show up. So there’s two things here already. Before they’ve even become a client, we are measuring how likely they are to book—that’s called our “set rate”—and then show up—for our “show rate.” This is really important because if you don’t measure these things, then you don’t know how your marketing is working. But today I’m really gonna be focused on what happens from the No Sweat Intro onward. So let’s say after somebody has made that booking, our client success manager, maybe your general manager, maybe one of your coaches, or maybe you are following up a lot to make sure that they actually show up. And we’ve found at Catalyst that sharing our mission actually helps with that.

Chris Cooper (03:42):
So that’s what we do when they show up and they do a No Sweat Intro. I’ve got a link here to our No Sweat Intro script. This is a basic motivational interview of about three to four questions that really digs down and gets to their motivation to want to exercise. And then from there, it’s the coach’s job to make a prescription on how they can get the results that they want fastest. And that prescription might include personal training, it might include semi-private, it might include group training, it might include nutrition coaching or a nutrition challenge or something like that. What I’ve got down here though is you know, when is it done? So first, the No Sweat Intro is obviously done during the No Sweat Intro time. It’s done at the gym. Our GM, Haley, does it, and I’ve got instructions here for the staff to follow, and that again, just links to Two-Brain materials.

Chris Cooper (04:33):
Of course, my gym is in the Two-Brain mentorship program, and so they have access to all of that. From there, I want the client to actually have their goals recorded. So it’s not the case that people are coming in because they want to try CrossFit. CrossFit is the tool that they are going to use to get fit. And if you’re a 9round franchisee, if you’re an F45, an Orangetheory, strength and conditioning gym, HIIT gym, boot camp, whatever, they want to use your service to achieve a specific result, I promise. And so what you’re gonna do here is actually record their goals. So this spreadsheet will serve as a template for each individual client, and a different version will be filled out for each client. Okay? When does that happen? It happens at the No Sweat Intro, which is done at the gym and done by the general manager.

Chris Cooper (05:19):
From there, we’re gonna take an InBody test. Then sometimes if they’re a competitive athlete, we might take a max heart rate or make a max-heart-rate calculation, okay? And that again depends on the client’s goals. For some clients that doesn’t really matter, but even if they’re just coming in off the street, we might just calculate what their max heart rate is, which is gonna help us make a better exercise prescription later. Okay? You might do something different in there. You might do a Functional Movement Screen or something else. And so, you know, I do have a blank here in case there’s any additional notes or there’s any additional testing that was done. Okay? That’s the first phase. Our first phase is Assess—what do they need? Can we help them get there? In some very rare cases, no, we can’t help them get there, and they need to go back to their doctor, or they need to go to a therapist first or whatever.

Chris Cooper (06:06):
Maybe we’re just not a good fit. The second phase of our 90-day journey is called Admit and Affirm. So we are admitting them into our program and we are affirming their decision to buy. So what we do here is make a prescription. So after we’ve done this testing, we open our sales binder and we say, “The fastest way for us to get you from where you are to where you want to go is blank.” And that prescription might be personal training or whatever. Then for them, we’ll say like, “Does this fit your goal?” And if they say “yes, that’s great” then we’ll sign them up. If we say “does this fit your goal?” and they say “no, it’s too expensive,” then we say “Okay, given your budget, I would do it this way. It’s not gonna be as fast, but it will be as effective over time.”

Chris Cooper (06:51):
So you might make a different prescription, but what’s really key is in the No Sweat Intro, the only goal is to get them signed up for our on-ramp program, which is gonna be done one-on-one. You don’t have to sell them on long-term personal training, long-term nutrition coaching. The simple goal of the No Sweat Intro is to get them into on-ramp. We know from working with thousands of clients over the years that our on-ramp program is really key to long-term retention. Some gyms who aren’t familiar with Two-Brain or aren’t familiar with an on-ramp might still believe the outdated idea that an on-ramp is a barrier to entry. It’s not a barrier to entry, but it is a barrier to exit. So from there, the next job of the GM is to take payment. This is on the client journey document because sometimes people will forget to say “what’s your credit card number” and take payment, and then the client will go away and just ghost us.

Chris Cooper (07:43):
Okay? So that’s important. We want that checked off. We want them to schedule their first on-ramp appointment. Now again, you might be saying, “This is really granular,” and it’s that way for a reason. I don’t want the client to leave without that first on-ramp appointment scheduled. If they do, there’s a chance they’ll change their mind, they’ll have some buyer’s remorse and not come back. Okay? Now, down below, again, who does it? Where do they do it? And there’s some links here on the exact template to download for the pricing binder for our on-ramp, and my clients can access that. And if you’re in Two-Brain, this is all available to you also, of course. Then we’re gonna schedule their healthy-habits appointment. So they’re still sitting in front of the GM and the GM is just checking off the checklist. They’ve paid, they’ve scheduled their first on-ramp appointment.

Chris Cooper (08:28):
Now I want them to have an appointment with our nutrition coach to talk about building the habits that will create success long term. Then the coach or the GM, the person that’s doing the No Sweat Intro, is going to share that client info with our client success manager. The client success manager’s job is to oversee each client’s journey through their first 90 days and beyond. Follow up with them, make sure that they’re staying on track. Retention is so important that we have a separate role for it. If you’ve got one person doing sales or one person doing marketing, then it’s e equally as important to have one person focused on retention. If you’re doing all that, this is a great role that’s very leverageable. It pays for itself many times over, and you can learn how to hire a CSM in the Two-Brain course.

Chris Cooper (09:14):
So boom check, okay, we’ve shared the info with the client success manager. Then the CSM sends them a welcome text: “Hey Jill, this is Jessica from Catalyst, and I’m here to be your guide.” The exact text script is right there. You can see it. They send a video on what the Catalyst method is so the client knows exactly what’s coming, and then within 48 hours, we want them to have at least their first on-ramp appointment or their first nutrition habits appointment. We want that gap between registration and first contact to be very, very small. The shorter you can make that, the better. Just like the time to return a client’s call after they enter their info on your website should be less than an hour if possible. You want them back in the gym and training within maximum 48 hours.

Chris Cooper (10:01):
So that’s really important. Then it tells here’s exactly what’s gonna happen. Okay? So they’re gonna have their nutrition-habits appointment probably first before we can get them in for their first on-ramp. In less-busy times, we were able to get them in for their first on-ramp sometimes the next day. But right now we’re so busy with new clients coming in that it might take a couple days till we can get them in for on-ramp. The healthy-habits appointment can be done virtually over Zoom or even the phone. And our nutrition coach can handle that. It’s only about a half an hour. So they’re gonna talk about how important nutrition is. They’re gonna provide recommendation for the very first step. So they’re gonna give them one thing they can do to improve their habits right off the bat. Then they’re going to say, “Do you prefer that I talk to you through email, text, what?”

Chris Cooper (10:49):
And they’re gonna give them a habits-tracking sheet, okay? So the client hasn’t started exercising yet, but they’ve joined the gym. They’ve paid, they’ve had a conversation with a coach, and they’re starting their fitness journey, even though we haven’t taught them a squat yet. Then the CSM will send them a video called “Sickness-Wellness-Fitness.” Now we’re into the third phase here, and we call this Activate and Acclimate. So we’ve activated their membership. We started teaching them about our gym, and so we’re going to be sending them things like the client’s bill of rights, the client’s code of conduct—basically like what do we do here? What is Catalyst? How are we different? So they feel like they fit in, so they don’t make any real gaffes, like showing up late for their first class or whatever.

Chris Cooper (11:32):
Okay? This is really important because the reason that a lot of people quit is not that they don’t like the exercise or they don’t see its value. It’s because they just think “I don’t fit in here.” And so you wanna give ’em all the tools and knowledge they need to feel like they fit in, okay? Then their first on-ramp workout is going to come. Now, what could happen here 10 to 20% of the time is that a client says, “I wanna get started today or tomorrow,” and we actually have capacity to take them and take their first on-ramp program workout. The cool thing here is that our on-ramp workouts are so dialed, and my staff has this client journey for every client, that I don’t have to have the same coach deliver the first and the second on-ramp. So if you know one coach is available, Tricia’s available today, let’s get this client started.

Chris Cooper (12:22):
Do the first on-ramp. Tricia isn’t available? She’s going on vacation for a week, but Dennis is available in two days. He can take her in the second on-ramp because we know that the experience is consistent over time. And so the first on-ramp workout, it’s basically upper-body push, and then they do a deadlift, and then they do this modified workout called Diane. It’s all spelled out. The coaches are doing it exactly the same way every time. Again, if you’re in Two-Brain, you’ll have this whole spreadsheet. You can click that link and you can actually see what that workout is if you want. Then we teach the client how to enter scores in our workout-tracking software. So before they even leave, we pull up the app, we make sure it’s on their phone, we log ’em in. We help them log their results because tracking results is a really important part of retention, okay?

Chris Cooper (13:09):
Then we can assign some homework, which is usually just some stretching or whatever, but the coach writes down what homework they gave them. The next day, the CSM is gonna follow up with them with this exact script. “How’s the workout? I got a new video for you today explaining the difference between your lifespan and your healthspan.” And you can use that video—if you’re in Two-Brain and you wanna use my video, you go right ahead, okay? If you’re not in Two-Brain and you wanna see the video, you can just go to the Catalyst Fitness YouTube channel and you’ll see some of these videos on there as a sample that you can duplicate and make your own. The second on-ramp, they’re teaching flexibility and weightlifting, okay? There’s the actual workout and everything. They’re gonna enter their scores in the tracking software.

Chris Cooper (13:51):
Then here’s the video that the CSM sends, and what’s happening is they are tracking the client’s progress on these sheets. So every day or every couple of days, the CSM is logging here. They’re gonna get a notification or they’re gonna be checking these spreadsheets and sending these texts. By now, a lot of you are thinking, “Wow, how can I just automate this?” And you’re right, every gym goes through this process of systemization and then optimization before they can grow. There is a way to optimize this, and that is using a CRM software like Kilo. However, you should do this manually. First, you should set it all up in a spreadsheet like this, run through it a few times, get your staff on board, get some reps in, and then move it all to your CRM to automate it instead of just setting up the automations.

Chris Cooper (14:44):
Okay? So, you know, we can go through the on-ramp here. They learn some stuff on the rings. They do a squat-endurance test from Level Method. They enter their scores. Here’s the messages they get sent, and then this takes them all the way through their sixth on-ramp session. That sixth on-ramp session is Fran. They get to do an all-time kind of CrossFit workout, you know. They get to experience intensity for the first time, and then from there, they’re brought back into a goal review. Okay? So all these sessions are done one-on-one. They are invited to try a group class with the coach after that if they want to. So after these six sessions are done, they should have a goal review booked. So this is probably gonna take them a week, maybe two weeks, to get these six sessions done. I guess two weeks.

Chris Cooper (15:32):
And then at that point, they’re right back into a goal-review meeting with the general manager or the coach who signed them up. So NSI, on-ramp, first goal review. And that goal review is where they check the prescription, okay? So they’re gonna say, “Now that you’ve done this, do you prefer to carry on one-on-one or do you prefer to try this in a group? Do you think you need more one-on-one attention in your nutrition or do you wanna wait until we have a challenge come up again?” Okay. And that’s it. It’s not really an upsell. Remember, the job of the NSI is to sell on-ramp. The job of this goal review is to make the best possible prescription for the client. Okay? So the GM is gonna look at their habit sheet, that habits-tracking sheet, and they’re gonna make them a new prescription, and that prescription is going to be called RX 1.

Chris Cooper (16:21):
Now, I’ve given you some samples here. So this client’s sample prescription was three strength days. That’s what SSS means. They’re got four Zone 2 days, so fairly easy aerobic days, one Zone 3, one Zone 5. So what they’re gonna say is like, “Okay, you can group some of the strength and Zone 2 days together.” You can handle this any way you want to, but at Catalyst we break that out a little bit and we’ll say you know, “That means you should be in the gym about four days a week. Are you more comfortable doing that one-on-one with me or in a small-group setting?” Depending on their answer, we’ll sell them the appropriate package for either CrossFit groups or a one-on-one group program, okay? And that’s it. That’s the decision that they have to make. All the instructions for this, of course, if you’re in Two-Brain, are can be found right at the bottom of this.

Chris Cooper (17:07):
I want my staff to have this. My gym is enrolled in Two-Brain, and so they have access to all this stuff. Then they take the payment for the recurring membership that the client is signing up for. So this fourth stage, which is the Accomplishment stage, is really getting the client going in your real program. They’ve been through on-ramp, they know how to do this stuff, they’re not gonna feel like an outsider anymore. They’re gonna be safe, they’re gonna be a decent mover. Now they’re joining your actual program. Okay? So you book the next goal review, you take their payment for the recurring membership, the CSM sends them a video. “Here’s the apps that you need. Here is our booking and billing app.” You might have something else. Level Method, if you’re using that, or Chalk It Pro or wherever you’re tracking your workouts and doing your billing and payments. That’s what you want.

Chris Cooper (17:57):
We send ’em one about SelfLoops, too. That’s how we track heart rate at Catalyst. Okay? After 30 days, the CSM checks in, okay? “Congrats on your one-month anniversary. How are things going?” And their job is just have a conversation. If there’s any little flags that come up that say that the client is less than thrilled, we want to know. Now, most of the time the client is pretty pumped up after a month. They love it. And so this is a great time for the CSM to just say, “I’m glad things are going so well. Tell me more.” If the client is like, “you’ve changed my life already,” the CSM might actually just call them or do a Zoom call and do an interview at that point. But in most cases, that’s coming up at the 90-day mark, which you’ll see in a moment.

Chris Cooper (18:38):
Here’s the 60-day check-in from the CSM, making sure that they remember that they’ve got a goal review at the 90-day mark, prepping them for that, making sure that things are still going well. If the client sent up a flag earlier, the CSM is gonna check in more often, like every week. Not every day, but we wanna make sure that the client is staying on track and feels like somebody cares enough to make sure. The fifth stage is called Adopt and Advocate. So at this stage, they’re pretty much bought into your program. Maybe they’re wearing your T-shirts. They’re 90 days in, they’re starting to feel better, they’re probably starting to get some results. And so now they’re gonna come in for their next goal review. At this point, they’re gonna do another InBody. They’re gonna see some results. They are going to talk about their new prescription going forward.

Chris Cooper (19:22):
So they do their goal review, they get their progress measured. We say, “Are you completely satisfied with your results?” If the answer is yes, then we’re going to ask for a testimonial. You know, “Can you share your story so that other people can experience the results that you have?” Or, “If sharing your story could help one other person, what would you tell them?” Something like that. Then we’re going to do Affinity Marketing to try and get a referral because at Catalyst, honestly, we’ve always been a referral-marketing business. We do run some Facebook ads. But most of our clients come from within because we remember to ask for referrals. Then we’re gonna make their second prescription. So, “You’ve got good results so far.” If they’re perfectly happy with their results and that’s what they say, then you go for a testimonial and a referral.

Chris Cooper (20:13):
If they’re not perfectly happy with their results, then you say, “Okay, in your shoes, if I wanted to speed up my progress, I would do this.” And you would just tell ’em as a coach, like, “personal training might get you there faster.” Or “doing this nutrition challenge might get you to your goals faster.” That’s all. Some people would think that this feels like an upsell, but it’s not. It’s just your duty as a coach to say “this would get you there faster.” Think about somebody coming into a doctor’s office, you know, 90 days after receiving a prescription for a medication. And you look at the symptoms, and you’re like, “Do you feel better?” And the client says, “Yes, I do.” You say, “Great, let’s just keep doing what you’re doing for now.”

Chris Cooper (20:53):
If the client says, “No, I don’t feel better,” then what’s the doctor gonna do? Right? Increase the dosage or change the medication. Like it’s your professional duty to make sure that your clients are getting results as quickly as possible. And that means recommending what will get them there faster. They might not take you up on it. They might say, “Nah, you know, I wish I was getting results faster, but I’m happy in the group.” Fine: “Go back to the group. We’ll talk again in 90 days, okay? Make sure that you’re making progress, even if it’s slower progress. That’s fine.” Because of course your group program is getting them results, just maybe not as fast as personal training would. Okay? Then upgrade membership if required. If your prescription includes a supplement, some of you do that, then you can a write that down here, okay?

Chris Cooper (21:38):
And so this is where, you know, maybe somebody is like, “Oh, I’m trying to get protein at every meal, but it’s a real struggle.” And you say, “Don’t worry. I’ve got a shortcut. It’s called whey protein. Here it is. This is what I recommend in my gym and sign up here.” And then from there you just get the new protein jug for ’em every 30 days. Or with most of our supplement vendors, they’ll just take care of the client from there and you’ll get the commission from it. So, you know, whatever you’re comfortable with there is fine. More and more I find that we’re working with really high-quality supplement companies, and so I feel good about prescribing a supplement where it will help. Then you book their next goal review. Here’s a 30-day check-in from the CSM.

Chris Cooper (22:24):
Here’s a 60-day check-in, and then 90 days from there. Now the client is more than six months into your program. There should be a recurring process where your CSM keeps checking in on everybody every 30 days, okay? That never, ever really ends. But the most important thing is that you’re doing these goal reviews. You know, when it comes to retention, there are certain things that work all the time, and goal reviews is one of them. I don’t mean that every single client that does a goal review is going to pay more—you’re gonna increase your ARM. But every single client that does a goal review is gonna stick with you longer and eventually become a more valuable client to you, and you are going to become more valuable to them because the changes that you’re giving them in their life compound over time, don’t they?

Chris Cooper (23:11):
And so if you really want to improve their fitness, their health span, their lifespan, you have to keep them around long enough to do it. In the microgym industry, the average length of time somebody stays in a gym is just under eight months. It’s not enough time to change a life. You have to get them out to like at least two years. That way, you’re not just on a marketing treadmill with your business. They’re not just on a workout treadmill with their fitness. You’re working together, you’re building a compounding business. And the best way to do that is to start with a plan like mapping out your 90-day client journey in advance. This was mine. Again, if you’re in Two-Brain, you have access to this spreadsheet. You have access to every link—you can copy and paste. What I recommend is if you’re in Two-Brain and you’re working with Kilo, set up your client journey using this template. Change anything you wanna change, and then move that all over to Kilo so that as much of it as possible is automated.

Chris Cooper (24:06):
I still prefer to have a human doing the CSM reach outs and stuff, but you can automate some of the texts that are the same. You know, for example, at a certain date they’ve done their second workout, send them this video. You can automate that if you want to do it manually a couple of times first. Really get it dialed in, make sure you love it, make sure that the clients love it, and then automate it if possible. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if this helps you, go to Gymownersunited.com, join our free Facebook group, and you can talk more about retention, ask questions there.

The post Red-Alert Retention: The A+ Plan for a Client’s First 90 Days appeared first on Two-Brain Business.