Chris Cooper's Blog, page 85

Study Reveals Kids’ Fitness Is Still Bad—but You Can Change That

Here’s a tragedy:

According to a new report, kids’ fitness has been varying levels of awful at a national level in Canada for 12 years straight.

That’s an entire generation of kids who didn’t move much and are now likely well on their way to being sedentary adults at heightened risk of all the diseases that come with inactivity.

It’s truly sad. And it highlights yet another opportunity for gym owners as a recession looms large.

The recently released “2022 ParticipACTION Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth” listed the following grades for kids fitness:

2010—F2011—F2012—F2013—D-2014—D-2015—D-2016—D-2018—D+2020—D+2022—D

This year’s D—a decline from 2020 and 2018—was awarded because the report creators believe just 28 percent of kids get an average of 60 minutes of “moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity” every day.

More horrid grades:

Active play—D-Organized sport—C+ (down from a B in 2020)Sedentary behaviours—F24-hour movement behaviours—F (“This year’s grade remains an F based on an average of 5% of children and youth in Canada meeting the physical activity, screen time and sleep duration recommendations within the ‘Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines.'”)

This is just terrible. And it’s very preventable.

Do You Have a Kids Program? Is It Full of Kids?

As a gym owner, you have the power to change these numbers. And I believe your work is far more important than anything governments can do. In recent times, legislators seem more inclined to tape off playgrounds and cancel kids sports. But I’ll avoid that rabbit hole.

If you can connect with children and help them learn to love movement now, the downstream benefits are immeasurable.

However, our 2022 State of the Industry data indicates that less than 40 percent of gyms offer kids programs. Those that do offer kids programs generate, on average, 9 percent of their revenue from serving young ones. (The full report—including Chris Cooper’s detailed analysis—will be released in December.)

I’ll challenge you to change those numbers for 2023. I’m not suggesting every gym must have a kids program. Some gym owners just aren’t into training youths and want to focus elsewhere. That’s fine. But Chris Cooper has long recommended gym owners grow a small number of strong revenue streams, and a kids program is an obvious option.

Kids programs are slam dunks for many reasons, and I won’t list them all. I’ll just remind you that helping kids will have a huge long-term effect on your community. And I’ll remind you that kids programs can generate a lot of revenue.

For example, a dozen gyms in our State of the Industry report generate between 25 and 40 percent of their revenue by serving kids. Some generate more. And most generate much less.

Those numbers should give you pause. Think about it: Without any extreme new space and equipment needs, you might be able to generate 20 percent more revenue at your gym. All you really need is a coach, who can be paid a percentage of program revenue—4/9ths is a great number. That means you won’t add any staffing costs that aren’t covered by new revenue.

So where do you get clients? This might be the easiest win of all: Many of your adult clients have kids. These parents already know, like and trust you, and they see value in your service. I’d suggest you’ll get five or 10 kids into a new youth program simply by starting one and telling your members about it (I actually did this at my gym).

Beyond “just starting a program,” you can use a host of tactics to get young ones moving in your gym. You don’t even have to come up with them. Just join the Facebook group Gym Owners United and comment on this post: “11 Ways to Super-Size a Kids Program—Fast.”

If you use even one or two of the tactics in that guide, you’ll generate revenue for your business.

And you’ll get more kids moving—which is becoming more and more important every year.

The post Study Reveals Kids’ Fitness Is Still Bad—but You Can Change That appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How This Gym Owner Makes $867 an Hour

Mike Warkentin (00:03):
My worst-paying job was $5 an hour at a fast-food joint—until I opened a gym. If I had calculated what I was paid per hour at that gym back in the day, it would’ve been pennies per hour. That’s not an exaggeration. Two-Brain helped me change that, thankfully. Keith, what’s the lowest hourly rate you’ve ever worked for?

Keith Yungel (00:22):
I believe it was $6.50 collecting golf balls at golf range.

Mike Warkentin (00:27):
Ah, kind of fun, but not a great rate. You beat that this month with an hourly rate—an effective hourly rate—of $867 as a gym owner, correct?

Keith Yungel (00:37):
I believe so, yes. Yep.

Mike Warkentin (00:39):
Yeah, that’s the number. Yeah. So we’re gonna dig into that. I’m Mike Warkentin. This is Two-Brain Radio. I’m here with Keith Yungel. Keith owns CrossFit Pawling in Pawling, New York. He was our August leader for effective hourly rate or EHR. Now, what is that? Divide your total pay, including all benefits from the business by the number of hours you worked on or in the business. That’s a big one because sometimes when you’re working on the business at home on your cell phone, you don’t count that. But that is work, and that does count. The shortcut here: you can divide your income by 2,000 hours. But that might not tell the whole tale if you’re working more than 40 hours per week or if your gym pays for your car or your cell phone or any of the other stuff. The point: you can drive up your EHR by working fewer hours or by making more money. We’re gonna dig into Keith’s big number—$867 per hour—find out how we did it, and we’re gonna help you increase your EHR as a gym owner. Keith, you ready to roll?

Keith Yungel (01:33):
I am.

Mike Warkentin (01:34):
All righty. Here we go. Now, I understand that your EHR is tied to something that’s kind of unsexy, but it’s really, really important: standard operating procedures. Tell me a little bit about how you operated before you had SOPs, roles and tasks and all that stuff. How were things back in the day when you first started?

Keith Yungel (01:52):
Yeah, so I was just in the trap of doing everything on my own, right? So I had some, some group-class coaches, but outside of that I was cleaning the gym. I was, you know, doing client success manager work even though I didn’t really know what a CSM was at the time. I was doing kids program, foundations, nutrition. I was basically doing everything.

Mike Warkentin (02:14):
Every hat.

Keith Yungel (02:15):
Every hat. Yeah. So at the time I just thought it was because I didn’t trust other people to take on those roles, but really it was because I just didn’t know a system or have a system to teach other people how to do it.

Mike Warkentin (02:33):
Yeah. I was kinda the same way, and I held onto a lot of roles. Part of it was like, “Oh, I can do it better than anyone else.” That’s common. But my real problem was I was scared to hire people and put the wrong people in the wrong spots and go through that whole hiring process. It felt like dating to me, and that scared me. I had trouble with it. A lot of gym owners have that, but we had the exact same history doing all the stuff. Your hourly rate back then, your effective hourly rate, probably would’ve been pretty low, I’m guessing, given that you were cleaning and doing all the other stuff.

Keith Yungel (03:02):
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I couldn’t even tell you what it was because at the time I wasn’t even really tracking my effective hourly rate, but I’ll tell you it was probably pretty low.

Mike Warkentin (03:12):
Because I’m sure you weren’t working 20 hours a week. You were probably working like 60, 70 or something just ridiculous.

Keith Yungel (03:18):
More. Yeah, I was putting in a ton of weekends. I didn’t see my wife much.

Mike Warkentin (03:26):
Yeah, but change is possible, right? So you’re here to tell us about that. So I wanna know how did you get out of the habit of getting sucked into those low-value roles—because it’s so easy for us as gym owners and driven people to just grab everything and do it all. How did you stop doing that?

Keith Yungel (03:43):
I mean basically it was the conversation with my mentor to start, right? It was a conversation with Shawn. I had just joined Two-Brain. I believe I was still in, I was either still in or just started Growth.

Mike Warkentin (03:59):
When was this?

Keith Yungel (04:01):
This was in 2020, so the beginning of 2020.

Mike Warkentin (04:05):
And we’re talking Shawn Rider as well?

Keith Yungel (04:07):
Shawn Rider. And this is right in the middle or beginning of lockdown. So it was a tough time. That’s why I decided to join up with Two-Brain. And so I’ll never forget, I had this conversation with him, and we were working on developing my nutrition program. And so he said, “Ask yourself how much earnings you’re gonna take from this, and how much time you’re gonna spend on this, and how much you’re really going to enjoy it versus hiring somebody else to do it. How much would you pay them? How much time would it them, and how would you spend your time otherwise?” I did some math. Now, throwing around numbers, I think I probably would’ve put a thousand bucks in my pocket if I ran a nutrition program. But it probably would’ve taken me about 20 hours that month to run the nutrition program. So what is that, $50 bucks an hour? I hired a coach to do it for four-ninths, but let’s round to 50% just for easy math. So I paid them 500 bucks. I paid myself 500 bucks, but I really only spent two hours mentoring that individual. So now my effective hourly rate was $250. So I had 18 extra hours to play with, and I just started duplicating that process. So I just started writing more SOPs and passing jobs along and hiring other coaches. So instead of coaching the kids class, I hired a kids coach. Instead of doing a bootcamp, I hired a coach to run the bootcamp. So I just kept duplicating this process with all that extra time that I had.

Mike Warkentin (06:24):
So, dare I say it, you started acting like an entrepreneur instead of an employee of a business, right? And that’s what we forget as gym owners because we have all these skills, we do all these things. We don’t act like entrepreneurs a lot of the time. We just start doing all the stuff rather than hiring people to do this stuff—but that’s what entrepreneurs should do. Like, Bill Gates does not build computers. Get someone to do this stuff. I’m gonna ask you about your SOPs, but just for listeners, I’m just gonna unpack a couple of things. There is an exact process to identifying the roles that need to get off your plate. Two-Brain has laid it out. It’s called “climbing the value ladder.” It involves math and there is an exact process. Your mentor will take you through it and you will look at all the roles you do, and you will look at how much you have to pay someone to take those rules off your plate. Then you would look at “how can I invest that time?”—exactly what Keith said—and you’re gonna pay for the cost of that role. Keith started with nutrition. Another easy example is cleaning. Cleaning costs 12, 15 bucks an hour or something like that. Takes most of us five or six hours a week or something like that. Do the math. If you can get rid of those hours for let’s say $150 a week, could you take six hours to make more money? Yes, you could do that as a gym owner. And you keep doing this all the way up the chain until you are the CEO of a gym business where you are doing minimal work on certain things. Other people are doing the service delivery and so forth, and you’re making some money off it at every step. And the four-ninths Model that Keith talked about is tied to the entrepreneurial concept. And what that is is you get someone to work in your business and you pay them 44% of the revenue. That person drives and grows and is responsible for the program. But you get a cut as the business owner for providing the space, the equipment, the market, the internet—everything that goes along with that program. Again, all this is systemized in the Two-Brain program, and we can teach you exactly how to do it. The key though, Keith, is SOPs. Because what I did was when I tried to offload stuff, I just chucked it at staff members washed my hands of it, walked out the door and it collapsed. And I was right back to vacuuming the floors. Tell me about SOPs. Cause it’s boring and it sucks, but it works and it’s the foundation of a business. How did you do it?

Keith Yungel (08:38):
So I took templates from Two-Brain. I can’t say I recreated the wheel at all. But I wrote out every single detail to a T like I was programming a robot.

Mike Warkentin:
Was that fun?

Keith Yungel:
No, not at all.

Mike Warkentin (08:55):
Was it worth it?

Keith Yungel (08:56):
It was. It’s well worth it—just writing every little detail. And what I would do is I would write it out and then go do it, go do the job, go perform the role, and then fill in the gaps. I’d come back and find out what I missed in the details. So it took me a while to figure out what to actually write in the SOPs. I would take things out, put things back in. So the first one that I really did was my nutrition SOP, and that was for my nutrition coach that I had hired. I actually started writing SOPs for positions I didn’t even have yet. I didn’t have a CSM, but I started writing an SOP for a CSM. You hand that SOP to somebody and go over it with that staff member and revisit until they have it down. And then they actually start to come back with their own ideas and fill in the gaps that maybe you missed that are gonna make that role even more advantageous to your gym.

Mike Warkentin (10:50):
So tedious, boring. But we give you the speed: Two-Brain will provide you with a lot of templates that’ll get a lot of it done for you. You just have to fill in the details, where the music volume goes to seven at your gym and at mine it’s nine or something like that. You can customize these templates. Still, I’m not gonna lie: it’s not fun. But the payoff is huge because you only have to do it that one time. You took it a step further and even got your future planned, right? Where you looked at all these roles that could possibly exist. And I bet when you thought, “Okay, I need to offload something or hire,” you just pulled out that thing from your pile and ran with it. Am I right?

Keith Yungel (11:24):
Absolutely. The toughest part was writing them, and then after that it was simple. It was easy, and it just fell into place after that.

Mike Warkentin (11:36):
Okay. So now tell me: how long does it take you to do this stuff when you’re meeting with staff members to maintain your systems and optimize things? How many hours a month or a week does that take?

Keith Yungel (11:47):
Depends on how many staff members you have and what roles you have, right? But I’d say, and again, depending on the role, you might meet with your cleaner once a once a month for 30 minutes. And the first time it could take an hour. You know, you’re just walking the gym with them and showing them everything that they have to clean and how everything works from, you know, from where the mop is to how to clean up when you’re done. And then the SOP is gonna run itself, and you’re just gonna audit that process and then meet with your cleaner again anytime that you feel that anything is not going the way that you would like it to go. You know, on the other hand, with your CSM, you’re gonna meet with a CSM much more often. So I’d say with a CSM it’s probably a couple of 30-minute meetings a month. So 30-minute biweekly meetings with your CSM. But again, it could be 15 minutes depending on the weeks. If everything’s going smooth and everything’s going great, it could just be a chat about life. So it’s not gonna end up being much about what’s going on in the gym sometimes.

Mike Warkentin (13:00):
So the maintenance of this system, if I’m getting you here, is not that difficult. It can be more at the beginning. There’s a little bit of extra work where you have to dial in a couple things, answer some extra questions, and maybe change a few things. But really at the end of it, you are probably taking a few hours a month to maintain the whole system, depending on your staff size. Would that be accurate?

Keith Yungel (13:19):
Yeah, I’d say, let’s just say an hour per staff member on average.

Mike Warkentin (13:26):
And so that’s a huge investment because that allows you to step out of service delivery. You essentially replicated yourself, and now you’re able to move on to higher-value rules. So what do you do with your time now?

Keith Yungel (13:38):
I mainly work on Affinity Marketing, and then all those meetings. So I have seven staff members, so six staff members that I spend, you know, on average, probably about 45 minutes per staff member on average. So, you know, it’s probably about five hours a month meeting with my staff and then a couple hours doing Affinity Marketing. Sometimes I’ll step into an NSI if my CSM can’t make it or my GM can’t make an appointment. And you know, I still do like to coach, right? So you know, I’ll coach generally one class a week. Sometimes it’s more like one class every 10 days. So I’m usually hitting about 10 hours a month when it’s all said and done.

Mike Warkentin (14:40):
In total work?

Keith Yungel (14:42):
In total work.

Mike Warkentin (14:44):
You get to see your wife again?

Keith Yungel (14:46):
Yeah. Funny, I have two kids now, so I get to see them, you know, a decent amount—as much as I really want to.

Mike Warkentin (14:54):
So that’s a bit different from the early days, I’m guessing.

Keith Yungel (14:57):
Oh yeah. It was late nights. You know, I’d come home after coaching at 9 o’clock at night, and then I would still have calls to make for lead nurturing, and I’d wake up early the next day and just do it all over again.

Mike Warkentin (15:14):
And because you’re a fitness guy, you know how to grind. We all do, and we make that mistake, and we get stuck in it. Listeners, I’m gonna give you a couple of acronyms. I’m gonna tell you what they were and define a few things for you. What Keith just said—CSM—is client success manager. We’ve talked about that a few times. That is the person to make sure your clients are staying in the business and they’re happy. They’re responsible for client happiness. We’ll call it a “low-value role,” but that’s just in terms of the payment. It’s not a $30-an-hour role. It’s something less than that, but it has huge rewards and it’s highly important. So when we say “low value,” it doesn’t mean it’s not an important role. It just means that it doesn’t generate as much revenue as, say, sales. Okay? So that’s what that is. Client success manager, essential to your business. Affinity Marketing, that is sales of a different sort. You’re talking to people that are close to your business. You’re talking to your clients inside your business: “Hey, do you have any friends and family that I can help?” It’s talking, outreaching, that kind of thing, as opposed to cold-calling people or putting ads on Facebook. NSI is a No Sweat Intro, a consultative process where people book an appointment to see you, you ask them what problems are they having, and you solve ’em with your services. It is essentially a sales meeting, but we call it a free consultation or No Sweat Intro. What Keith is working on, he’s the CEO and manager, right? Do you have a GM, Keith?

Keith Yungel (16:30):
I do, yep.

Mike Warkentin (16:31):
So you’re the CEO working more closely with your GM, who manages a ton of stuff that you don’t have to deal with. So you’ve got CEO time and you are doing marketing and sales, which are very high-value roles because they bring in money for the business. All of that is huge. You went from cleaning to the highest level as a CEO in the gym, and you did that in two years and a little bit, is that correct?

Keith Yungel (16:54):
Yeah, about two and a half years.

Mike Warkentin (16:57):
So it’s possible. And you went from making a lower rate to $867 per hour because you’re making a good wage and you’re not working 75 hours a week. Correct?

Keith Yungel (17:08):
Correct. Absolutely.

Mike Warkentin (17:09):
So here’s where we help somebody. Gym owners out there right now are listening and they are drowning in work. Someone out there asks you, “How the hell do I start this process?” What do you tell them? They wanna be you now and they’re you from two years ago? How do they get here?

Keith Yungel (17:24):
Yeah, like you said, there’s nothing sexy about it. It’s just starting to find the right people’s probably the toughest part, right? I think that’s a whole other podcast. Find the right people, right? But really being prepared before you even find those people with the SOPs. Write out everything that you do in detail. Find the right person, delegate it, and don’t just hand it off and then just expect them to just follow all the bullet points, right? Take a month to teach them, do the work with them. Take a month, give it to them, completely mentor them through the process. And I say a month, but depending on the role, it could be a month to two months to three months, right? And then let them take that role, and then just begin checking in with them once or twice a week or month for 15, 30 minutes, and just continue to audit that role or audit the SOP. Start out with something that you really do not enjoy. So it’s something that is sucking the energy from you. Maybe you don’t like coaching your kids program. Maybe you don’t like working on nutrition with people. Maybe you don’t like cleaning your gym. Whatever it is that’s sucking the energy out, start with those roles because those hours that you get back are gonna be “energy hours.”

Mike Warkentin (19:11):
We have a thing called the “love and loathe list,” and that’s another exercise our mentors will help people do. It’s “what do you like doing and what do you loathe?” And for me, accounting stuff, I hate it. That would be something to offload because not only is it going to save me time because I’m not good at it, but it’s going to save me energy, as you just explained. So listeners, what I’ll get you to do, I’ll challenge you to put down the mop and take some time to do the dirty work of writing out your roles and tasks. Do that. You only have to do that one time. From there, you’re gonna have to hire. Like Keith said, that’s a whole different show. And we do have hiring shows in our archives that you can check out. Then the final step of that is not to just push the cart down the mountain and assume it will go all the way to the bottom without tipping over. You have to monitor the thing, but it doesn’t take a ton of time. Once you start to systemize things and get the process down, it’s going to go very smoothly. The final step there, one of your greatest hires is gonna be a general manager who’s gonna take care of most of that work for you, and you are just gonna be the CEO who checks in on certain high-level things. You can do whatever you want, as much or as little as you wanna do, and you get time to spend with your family. Keith, thank you so much for sharing this with everyone. It’s a great story. I love hearing from someone who did what I did back in the day and then fixed it in less than two years. So thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

Keith Yungel (20:30):
Absolutely. Thanks for having me here.

Mike Warkentin (20:34):
That was EHR leader Keith Yungel on Two-Brain Radio. Thanks for listening. Please hit subscribe on the way, wherever you’re watching or listening to the show. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper (20:46):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. The Gym Owner’s United Facebook group has more than 6,100 members, and it’s growing daily. If you aren’t benefiting from the free tips and tactics and resources that I post daily in that group, what are you waiting for? Get in there and grow your business. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or www.gymownersunited.com. Join today.

The post How This Gym Owner Makes $867 an Hour appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Find Clarity and Build Wealth as a Fitness Entrepreneur

Chris Cooper (00:01):
How do you actually grow your business? How do you literally make more money? How do you beat overwhelm and paralysis by analysis and just the general busy-ness that comes with owning a gym? You do it by focusing on one thing at a time, by taking one small step today, right now. By finding clarity and then doing one thing at a time until you gain momentum. So today I’m gonna tell you how to filter out the noise of bad ideas and badly timed ideas and stress, how to identify what you need to do in your business and in what order you need to do it, how to beat overwhelm and take action, and why it’s critical to be clear with your staff—and how to do it without being a jerk. So this is one of the most important podcasts that I’m going to give you.

Chris Cooper (00:51):
All the free ideas, all the inspirational books, all the education that we share on Twobrainbusiness.com every single day for free, it could be literally worth millions of dollars to your business, but if you don’t use it, it’s literally worth zero. I’m Chris Cooper, I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, and if you have questions about this episode, please go to Gymownersunited.com, which will redirect you to our free Facebook group just for gym owners, where we answer questions and talk about stuff like this every single day. Again, it’s free. The difference between gym owners who succeed and gym owners who don’t is not stronger work ethic. It’s not their location. It’s their ability to focus on the right work at the right time, and then do it.

Chris Cooper (01:39):
So today, before we get into what exactly you should be focusing on depending on where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, I’m gonna give you some filters. I’m gonna start off right away with five amazing tools to help you filter out your ideas and all the overwhelm that comes from being a gym owner. So the five filters that you need to grow your business. First off, the reason that you need filters is that you have too many ideas, right? Not all these ideas are bad; most are good. The problem is that you can’t do all of them, and you get more ideas every day. The further you progress in your entrepreneurial journey, the more ideas you’re going to have. You’re never gonna run out of ideas. And as our social presence increases online, you’re getting exposed to more and more thoughts. And so for now, you’re getting exposed to so many things that you’re probably treading water, but if you’re not careful, you can actually drown in things that you could do unless you have really powerful filters. And, hey, look, I’m giving you free stuff every day. Eleven times a week, we publish tips and tactics and you need to filter “which one do I do first? Which one can I not do? Which one can I save until later?” That’s what mentorship is really all about. Here are the five filters that I teach that you can do yourself, though. First off, the BS filter: Is this thing that I’m learning about an idea or is it a proven strategy? In other words, has the person sharing the idea actually implemented it, tracked data and compared it to something else? For example, they might say in a Facebook group, “The panther floor scrubber is the best. We love it. And so do our members.” And I might answer with “what else have you tried?” And usually the response would be “nothing.” So this isn’t really a problem in Gymownersunited.com, but it really is a huge problem in other groups. As a mentor once told me, don’t trust people who are willing to make bets with your money.

Chris Cooper (03:42):
If they’re pulling ideas outta the air and feeding them to other people, then don’t listen to anything that they say. Now, this is the “easy-hard filter” because it’s easy to be skeptical about people, but it’s hard to filter ideas. So if you see a good idea from a sketchy source, you might wanna still try it if it passes the other filters, but if you see something that seems like a great idea and it comes from somebody you don’t know, you might wanna pass it through the BS filter. Another great example: “Adding 24-hour access was the greatest thing that we’ve ever done for our gym.” First follow-up question: “What else have you done for your gym?” Okay, so even when an idea is great, it might not be your top priority right now. It might be something that you think about again, in six months, a year, three years, when you’ve done the big things, the more important things that will actually move the needle for you.

Chris Cooper (04:34):
So the BS filter is my first one. The second filter is the math filter. And in this filter, you’re asking yourself, “Which metric in my business will change by how much and what will happen if I do nothing?” So if you’re tracking your average revenue per member—ARM—or your length of engagement–LEG—and you’re tracking your profit, then the math filter is pretty simple. You simply write down all the ideas you’re thinking about, and then you hold them up to the lens of your metrics and say, “Will this one improve my ARM? Will it improve my LEG? Will it improve my profit? And by how much?” Now, if you’re not sure or you’re not tracking your metrics, then just put that idea aside until you are. Being sure means having data. So, for example, “Clients who start with one-on-one training for at least five sessions have an increased LEG of four months.”

Chris Cooper (05:27):
That is great data. “Our clients love having couches to crash on after class.” That’s not data. Maybe having couches means nothing. Maybe it means something. Maybe it improves your LEG by one month, maybe by 10 months, but you don’t know. And there are knowable things that improve your LEG. So focus on those first. You have more than enough ideas, so let’s just stick to the ones that will show a measurable benefit first because you just can’t do everything. My third filter is the time filter. And the key question is “do I need to do this right now or when is best?” So we’re all drawn to urgency over importance, right? Like it’s why some people smoke cigarettes instead of exercising. Now, personally, I have this tremendous fear that if I don’t act on a great idea now, somebody else will and the opportunity will disappear for me.

Chris Cooper (06:21):
Derek Sivers’ book “Anything You Want” has helped me a lot with this, and my business mentors often help by telling me, “Let’s put that on the list for next quarter. And if it’s still a really exciting opportunity, we’ll do it then.” I can literally hear the voice of Marcy Swenson, one of my business mentors, saying that as I’m saying it to you. Remember, you’re not gonna run out of great ideas. This new thing that you see, TikTok ads, it might be a great option for you in six months, but if you don’t have a staff playbook right now or you haven’t refined your lead-nurture process or your sales process, don’t worry about TikTok ads at this point. My fourth filter is the variables filter. And the question I ask here is “what is the next best step?” George Dantzig wasn’t the lead singer of the Misfits, right?

Chris Cooper (07:10):
You have to like punk to understand that joke. This Dantzig was a mathematician. He invented the simplex method. So the simplex method goes like this: There are too many things that you could do right now to change your future, and we can’t measure the outcome on any of them precisely because there’s just too many variables. So the best thing that you can do right now is to determine your first best step. So that’s harder than it sounds. You need an objective eye on your business. If you don’t have a mentor yet, then you should get a mentor. And this is all about taking action, right? It’s not like thinking about what happens after this or all the possible outcomes, all the possible variables, which are impossible to predict. A lot of the times we stop ourselves from taking action because we forecast into the future.

Chris Cooper (07:59):
You know, “I’m gonna raise my rates, which will increase my ARM, but man, what if this client really gets mad? And what if she posts something on social media? And what if that social media post means five other people quit? And what if Lisa quits and starts her own gym? Like she’s got the money to do it, right?” We extrapolate multiple steps into the future, and those are impossible to predict, but we’re just really good at telling our stories to ourselves. So you have to ask yourself, “What is the next right step?” And my fifth filter is called the context filter. And this is “is this thing right for my specific case right now?” Why can no entrepreneur remain objective about his or her business? We’re subjective creatures. We all need a mentor who knows our history and can see our future.

Chris Cooper (08:46):
The blessing of being a smart entrepreneurial person is also a curse. You’ll always have more ideas than you can possibly act on. Just yesterday, a friend offered to sell me his company, which is built on a great idea, right? It’s already profitable. It’s already working from the help-first ethos that I love. So I got really excited, and that idea passed through my BS filter, right? I know his history and I trust him. It passed the math filter. I know his numbers. But it didn’t pass my time filter because I have other investments that will yield a greater return for me. So I passed the idea along to a different friend. Being successful doesn’t mean doing more things. It means doing the right things. My mentors filter my great ideas and opportunities. Who filters yours? Now I’m gonna give you a good way to determine what you should be doing right now.

Chris Cooper (09:40):
I don’t wanna just give you ways to say no to things. This podcast and all of our materials have been about “what exactly should you do?” And so that’s what I’m gonna share with you now: how to build a model for determining what different people should do. To do it, I had to think through the different stages of entrepreneurship, and I wrote this book about it called “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief.” And that book goes into great depth—some would say too much depth—on what you should be doing at each phase, when each phase starts, when it ends, how your focus should shift, what you should be doing differently at each phase as you travel through your entrepreneurial journey. So I’m gonna start by giving you some clarity on what you should be doing in the Founder Phase of your business. The Founder Phase of gym ownership is the startup phase, right?

Chris Cooper (10:28):
You’re doing everything yourself. You’re working long hours, you’re sweeping the floors, you’re coaching the clients. There are a million things that you could do. So what should your focus be? Your focus should be cash flow. You need more revenue coming in than expenses going out. You need to set up the foundation of sustainability long term so that you can grow without sliding backward. You need to build your gym on a house of rock. And rock is your cash flow. Every action that you take in the Founder Phase should provide the answer to one question: “Will this improve my cash flow?” So, for example, in Founder Phase, doing a personal-training session will increase your cash flow for now because you can sell that hour of time for high value. Mopping the floors might improve your cash flow for now because you don’t have to pay anybody else to do it.

Chris Cooper (11:20):
Setting up a Facebook marketing campaign will improve your cash flow by speeding up your lead generation. But earning an advanced coaching credential won’t improve your cash flow. Arguing with other gym owners online won’t improve your cash flow. Simply delivering a great service won’t improve your cash flow. It’s necessary but not sufficient—one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever learned. Until your gym is profitable and paying you at least a thousand dollars a month after expenses, you have to finish every day with this question: “Did I take one action to improve my gym’s cash flow today or not?” Now, when you’ve reached that point where the gym is consistently paying you at least a thousand dollars a month, you start to enter what we call the Farmer Phase. And the goal of Farmer Phase is to earn a hundred thousand dollars per year from your microgym.

Chris Cooper (12:12):
It’s to improve your income. This is mostly done by growing your gym. So by growing your gym, you’re also growing the number of people that you manage. You’re growing your audience, you’re serving more people than you could by yourself. And now you’re probably serving many people at once. You have larger costs. You have more risk and hopefully higher revenues. There are a million things that you could do in this phase, which we call a Farmer Phase. So what should your focus be? It should be improving net owner benefit—NOB. NOB is what your business pays you. That includes a wage. It includes your profit distributions and all the little extras that your business covers for you, like your cell phone or maybe your car payment. Your net owner benefit target in Farmer Phase should be a hundred thousand per year. Or you can adjust that up and down if you live outside North America.

Chris Cooper (13:06):

But the bottom line is that your business should pay you a little bit more than you need so that you can translate that income into wealth later in Tinker Phase. It should take a little less time than you have and pay you a little bit more than you need so that you can reinvest your time and money. So every action that you take in the Farmer Phase should provide an answer to this question: “Will this action improve my net owner benefit?” For example, raising your rates improves your net owner benefit. Selling nutrition coaching or personal training improves your net owner benefit—as long as you have a good ratio of reward for your staff instead of just giving it all to them. Getting more clients improves your net owner benefit unless you’re adding more facilities and space and equipment. That increases your expenses, too.

Chris Cooper (14:00):
And adopting a pay-yourself-first strategy like Profit First improves your net owner benefit because more of the revenue converts to income in your business. There are some things that don’t improve net owner benefit, like buying more equipment. Most of the reinvestment—quote-unquote, air quotes—in your business does not improve your net owner benefit. You’re making the business bigger, you’re paying the landlord more, you’re paying the government more, you’re paying your staff more, but you’re not increasing your net owner benefit. Hiring a general manager probably won’t increase your net owner benefit. The only time it does is if it that buys you time to scale your business up. Now, of course, there’s a balance to consider here, right? Buying more equipment might someday improve your net owner benefit by allowing you to train more clients. Hiring a cleaner will improve your net owner benefit, but only if you reinvest that time into higher-value roles like marketing and improving your sales process.

Chris Cooper (14:55):
But in Farmer Phase, you don’t need to hire a general manager. You don’t need to set up staff health-care benefits. You don’t need to expand your facility until you’re earning more than a hundred thousand per year yourself. That is the test of your systems. Can you make yourself your first well-paid, full-time staff person? Now, of course, there are exceptions to all of this. That’s why we’re a one-on-one mentorship practice instead of just pushing a system on you. And if you wanna determine your largest roadblock to earning $100,000 a year, you can book a call with my team through the show notes below. Once you’re earning $80,000 to about a hundred thousand, when you’ve got a little bit of free time, the next best thing that you can do is start to think about the next level. And that’s scaling, investing, growing as leader or improving your lifestyle.

Chris Cooper (15:43):
Because if you don’t think about the next level, what will happen is what happens to most entrepreneurs: They become a micromanager of their fairly successful business. They stay in the business, they look for problems to solve, they look for things to break. They’re constantly changing a working machine, and they like stick their fingers in, or they think “let’s change our programming. Or maybe now that we’re successful, I should go open a second location.” While you should have those goals, it’s really important that you establish this solid base first. And when you have that solid base, we say that you’re moving into the Tinker Phase. The goal of the Tinker Phase is to transfer your income into wealth. Wealth because that creates impact for multiple generations of your family. Wealth because that expands your platform for impact in your community. And wealth because that allows you to grow the opportunities for your staff.

Chris Cooper (16:40):
So this platform that you’re building of a million dollars net worth can include your gym, but it might also include things like a second or third gym, cash-flow assets like real estate, owning a building or compounding investments like index funds, or maybe another service for your primary audience. Maybe you’re gonna start a supplement company, right? Or lots more entrepreneurs in our Tinker program are opening more locations. They’re sometimes starting churches. They’re franchising, they’re writing books, building their personal brand. They’re doing all sorts of amazing things. And I’ve got a link to a video in the show notes about impact and how to turn the income from your first gym into a multi-generational, multi-platform impact. But the bottom line here is that when you’re in the Tinker Phase, every idea, every action that you take, has to pass this question: “Does this get me closer to a net worth of $1 million?”

Chris Cooper (17:35):
So, for example, buying a building gets you closer to a net worth of a million. Opening a second location should get you closer to a net worth of a million if you do it right. Paying off your personal debt gets you closer to a net worth of a million, but rebuilding your website doesn’t get you closer to that goal. Most DIY projects don’t get you closer to that goal. Designing your own T-shirts does not get you closer to that goal. Coaching more classes at your gym won’t get you closer to that goal. Of course, some of these big moves like real estate and investing come with higher risk. As the rewards of entrepreneurship grow, the risks usually grow with them. To minimize risk, you must grow as a leader and become more self-disciplined. And that’s what our Tinker program is set up to do: to develop entrepreneurs to build their million-dollar platforms.

Chris Cooper (18:25):
So if you’re not sure where you fall and these hints weren’t enough, you can take our test. There’s a link in the show notes. You can go on the Twobrainbusiness.com site and take the Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief test, determine where you are, and then that’ll tell you what you should be focused on right now. These filters are incredibly powerful because the biggest hurdle now to growing as an entrepreneur is not knowledge. Knowledge is free. There’s enough stuff on the Twobrainbusiness.com website to grow your business to infinite levels. The real power comes from focus, and focus comes from filters: filtering out the things that you don’t need to do ever from the things that you don’t need to do right now to the things that you should be doing right now. And then finally acting on them with the accountability of a mentor. If you have more questions about the Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief process or the entrepreneurial journey or how to get more focus, join Gymownersunited.com. It’s free. There’s 6,000 gym owners in there to help you. I’m in there about once a day. My mentors are in there. We can share resources and tips and tactics to help you get there. Gymownersunited.com will take you directly to that free Facebook group. We are there to help you.

The post How to Find Clarity and Build Wealth as a Fitness Entrepreneur appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Recession: 3 Stats, 2 Tactics and 1 Upcoming Survival Guide

A recent study of 2,000 adult Americans offered three very interesting pieces of data for gym owners:

62 percent of survey respondents with a “wellness routine” said related expenses would be one of the last things they would cut due to inflation.83 percent said they believe cutting a wellness routine would end up creating greater long-term costs.47 percent believe aging and sickness are inevitable and have no hope of preventing them (the Generation Z and Millennial numbers were 7 and 9 percent higher, respectively).

The survey was commissioned by Restore Hyper Wellness and is focused mostly on the recovery services Restore offers (intramuscular vitamin shots, infrared saunas and red-light therapy, cryotherapy, compression therapy, etc.). You can read it here, though much of it won’t interest the average gym owner who focuses on coaching rather than recovery services.

That said, the general numbers listed above should offer some comfort to microgym owners who are nervous about the coming recession.

It’s great to know the majority of people in this survey won’t put fitness services on the chopping block. The data confirms what Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper stated in his article “Beating the Recession”: Recessions aren’t necessarily bad news for microgym owners who sell coaching. Clients who can afford and clearly see the value in your high-value services won’t cancel at the same rate as people who signed up for $29.99 monthly memberships they aren’t even using.

But if you’re still nervous about the effects of the economy on your clients, you’d do well to keep highlighting the benefits of your services. Whenever you see info that details how fitness reduces stress, improves sleep, or makes a person more likely to avoid certain diseases or afflictions, tell your clients about it. And congratulate them for investing in themselves.

Don’t assume every client knows or always remembers how important fitness training is. Tell them regularly so they hear your voice in their heads when they go over their budget numbers. Your big win will be when they mentally mark the fees for your services as an “investment,” not a cost.

When it comes to growth, you might consider creating some content for the 50 percent of people who think sickness and significant age-related declines are inevitable. Fitter people can avoid a host of diseases, and they’re generally more resilient when they do get sick. And we all get old, but fitness training is the best way to preserve and even improve capacity. Tell the world—regularly! If you do, you might even add a few new members who are desperate to reduce stress, avoid illness and remain independent as they weather the recession.

The worst plan: Do nothing.

I’ve given you two media tactics you can use today to retain your clients and add more even as inflation soars. But there are many more:

Two-Brain Business will publish a tactical recession survival guide for fitness entrepreneurs in the Gym Owners United Facebook group. To get it, join the group today and watch for Chris Cooper’s post on the morning of Oct. 25. If you’re new to the group, check out Chris’s pinned post on growing a kids program—that guide can help you diversify your revenue stream very quickly.

And if you want to go even further and get a tailored plan to stabilize and grow your gym during the recession, consider working with a Two-Brain mentor. To find out more about that, book a free call.

The post The Recession: 3 Stats, 2 Tactics and 1 Upcoming Survival Guide appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Four Hard-Won Rules for Staffing in a Gym

Chris Cooper (00:02):
I have hired hundreds of people in my career as an entrepreneur. Dozens of those didn’t work out, but every one taught me a lesson. And what I’ve come away with are four hard-won rules for hiring and keeping the right staff. I’m Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, and if you like this episode, please go to gymownersunited.com. It’s for gym owners only. We talk about things like staffing, keeping staff, hiring staff and removing staff. And I think you’re gonna get a lot of value out of it. It’s a free Facebook group. My mentors and I are in there around once a day to go through the conversations. And there are 6,000 other high-quality gym owners in there who can contribute to your knowledge and keep you moving forward. Gymownersunited.com. And now, four hard-won rules for staff. These are the things that I’ve learned at different points in my career. As I have grown my gym, as I have bought and sold a bunch of other businesses, and as I have let some businesses just kind of go away, as I’ve promoted some people, as I’ve launched some people into their own platforms, I’ve learned these four core rules for staff. And today I’m gonna share them with you. So the first rule for staff that was hard, one that really was a pivot point in my understanding and started changing the trajectory of my gym, was this: number one, tell them what you want to do in advance instead of punishing them for making the wrong choice later. There are different ways to say this. The first is that staff can’t read your mind. Nobody can. Most of your business exists in your head. Most of the ways that you do things or want things done exist as a clear picture in your mind, but not in theirs. Let me give an example here. You might write down like, “Hey, when you’re coaching a group class at my gym, you need to show up on time.”

Chris Cooper (01:49):
For my generation, and if you’re over 40 probably for yours, that means you show up 15 minutes early and you are ready to go–shoes tied, hair combed, shirt on with five minutes to go, and you’re welcoming people. For a different generation, like my kid’s generation, showing up on time means that you show up at exactly 7 a.m. and the meter starts running then, and you have to tie your shoes before you can start the class. And so the class might eventually start at 9:05, 9:07. So when you’re telling people, “Here’s how I want things done,” you need to explain to people, like in writing, in pictures or in video, exactly how you want things done because nobody else can see that picture in your mind. In our mentorship programs, we have you writing down SOPs and staff playbooks.

Chris Cooper (02:43):
We give you templates to make it easier, but the bottom line is that we wanna get your business out of your head and into the head of your staff people. It’s not enough to just “hire great people” because it’s not enough to just assume that what you know is common knowledge. It’s not. You have to get stuff out of your head. So the number one rule for staff, if you do nothing else, if you shut off the podcast right here, is tell them what you want them to do in advance instead of just punishing them for making the wrong choice later. Second hard-won rule for staff is hire for the job that you want instead of just promoting the people you love. So another way to say this might be that the people that got you here might not be the ones who get you there.

Chris Cooper (03:27):
That doesn’t mean you have to fire your friends. What it means is that you probably hired your friends in the early days and you hired them for a specific thing. Maybe it’s to coach, and then you said, “I’d love to have this friend with me all day every day. They’re my bestie and I want them to quit their other job as a firefighter and just work in the gym. So what are some other things that I can give them to make that come true? I could give them my social-media account and they could post there every day. And what else? I could give them my cleaning job. I got some cleaning jobs. I could pay them for programming.” Here’s the problem. Your friend might be a great coach. That’s great. If you have a good friend who’s also a great coach, you have won the lottery twice in a row.

Chris Cooper (04:10):
That doesn’t mean that they’re also great at social media. It doesn’t mean that they’re also great at cleaning. It doesn’t extrapolate to programming or these other roles at your gym. All of us try way too hard to create jobs for people we like instead of hiring the best people for the job. And this is a big problem that you see in every industry, but it’s especially rampant in the fitness industry where we’re trying to cobble together these full-time roles for coaches way before our business is ready to support that. So hire for the job that you want done instead of the people that you have. No matter how much you love the person, if you put them in a role that they are not prepared to do, they will fail, then they will get frustrated, then they will get either sad or angry, probably both, and it will harm your relationship, okay?

Chris Cooper (05:04):
Don’t promote people beyond their level of competence. If you have somebody who you think has the building blocks to be a great gym manager and you are earning more than enough and you’re ready to hire a manager so that you can move on and think about scaling your fitness empire, great, then ask yourself, “How will you train them to manage?” Because that’s a skill that you’ve had to acquire over time. It doesn’t just come in the package. People aren’t just born with managerial skills built in. How are you gonna teach the management skills? Will you get them their own mentor, et cetera? Hire for the job that you want done instead of just the people that you have. The third hard-won rule for staff is don’t incentivize things that are beyond their control. This is actually demoralizing and counterproductive. So for example, if you tell your staff like, “Hey guys, if we can grow our revenue by 10% in the next quarter, I will give everybody a $500 bonus.”

Chris Cooper (05:55):

Well, that sounds like a, a win-win, right? But trust me, as somebody who’s worked in that environment before, it’s actually demotivating. So what will happen is this: the first quarter you get super excited—”Okay, here’s a way for me to earn another 500 bucks.” And maybe in that first quarter, the gym does grow, but you don’t know how the gym grew. Or maybe you do, but your staff doesn’t. They think that the gym just grew because they’re such great coaches. Awesome. All we have to do is keep being great coaches “and the gym will grow, and I’ve got my 500 bucks. I’m taking that home to my wife. I’m telling her we can afford new shoes for the kids when they’re going back to school or to the Christmas concert. Wonderful.” What happens when you make more money: your expenses expand to spend that money.

Chris Cooper (06:42):
And so pretty soon you come to rely on that money. And so in the next quarter, you say to your staff, “We’re gonna do that again. If our revenue grows 10%, I’ll give you all a $500 bonus.” And the staff says, “Wonderful.” And then you don’t make it. Oh. What happens now? Well, the staff was probably counting on that 500 bucks. So now they don’t get the money. And worse, they don’t know why. They perceive that you did something wrong because they did the exact same job they’ve always been doing. And if the revenue didn’t grow, well, why? In the worst-case scenario, they actually get suspicious of you: “Ah, he’s just hoarding the money.” Or, “Hey, we know how much money’s coming into this gym. $20,000 a month. This guy must be a millionaire. Why isn’t he sharing that with us? He did before.”

Chris Cooper (07:30):
They don’t see the expenses. They don’t see the reinvestment that you make. There’s also different ways that you can qualify something as profit or not. And so now you’re in this position where they feel like you owe them something. You feel like the gym doesn’t have the money to pay them, but you’ve kind of made this promise. What do you do? So the rule here, again, to get back to it, is don’t incentivize for things that are beyond their control. If they do not have a lever to pull that will change the outcome directly, and they don’t understand how that will change the outcome, don’t put an incentive on that, right? Like, don’t incentivize your coaching staff for growing the gym because they can’t grow the gym. That’s your job. Don’t incentivize your management for generating more leads unless they know how to generate more leads and that’s part of their job.

Chris Cooper (08:22):
So don’t incentivize for things beyond their control. I have seen way too many businesses—and there was actually this business-coaching model in the past where if somebody was coaching 30 hours a week, they would actually take 10% of the business or something. And what did this create? It created poverty for the owner. It created poverty, frustration for the staff because they didn’t know how to grow a business, either. The only person that this actually helped was the business coach that was pushing this ridiculous model. So don’t incentivize for things that are beyond their direct control. I’ll give you another good example. You say to the coaches, “Hey our retention numbers are bad. We, we have like a 10% churn rate every month. If we can give that churn rate down to 5%, I’ll give everybody a thousand dollars bonus, Okay?”

Chris Cooper (09:09):
And the coaches are like, “Awesome. Okay, what do we do? Well, we’re not doing anything differently. We’re just gonna do everything that we’re currently doing better.” Okay, great. So they go out and they coach better, and then, you know, their retention rate doesn’t improve because nobody’s doing anything differently. Everybody’s mad, everybody’s frustrated. I’ll give you another great example. You incentivize them for something that they don’t even understand. Like profit. “Hey, guys, if the gym profits by $5,000 this month, I’ll share the wealth. I’ll give you $500 and you $700, and you another $500. But they don’t understand how to run a business. And so they don’t understand where profit comes from. And so at the end of the month, let’s say that you’ve got this big tax bill that you, whoops, didn’t foresee, and all of your money goes to that tax bill. You’re not profitable, and they’re looking at the revenue going, “Well, we got more money. We know there’s more clients coming in. How are we less profitable? Why aren’t we getting this bonus?” If you incentivize people for things that they can’t control and, worse, don’t understand, you will create churn because you’re gonna be creating frustration and anger. What can you incentivize for? Well, let’s say, for example, that you hire somebody who has a proven track record for marketing or a proven track record for sales. You can hire them and incentivize them if they’re better at that job than you are. So, for example, maybe you’re getting in 10 No Sweat Intros a month and you’re closing four of them. But you know that if you hire somebody who’s good at this, you might close six. Well, that’s worth incentivizing them for. But if all you say is “okay, coach, I’m gonna teach you how to do No Sweat Intros and I’m gonna pay you an extra 200 bucks for every person who signs up” but you don’t provide further training and you don’t do role-play, and you don’t create a salesperson who’s better than you, then that incentive means nothing.

Chris Cooper (11:00):

It’s just luck, right? If somebody signs up, they get the money, more money, than you needed to pay them. If somebody doesn’t sign up, that’s just bad luck, right? And you’re not improving your process. You’re not driving the outcome. Incentives exist to drive an outcome. They don’t exist as a reward. If you wanna give people a reward or a bonus, do it. But you don’t have to announce it, and you don’t have to tie it to performance. All right? So that’s my third hard-won rule for staff. Now is a bit of a rant. Fourth hard-won rule for staff is don’t hire full-time staff until you are making a full-time wage yourself. As a gym owner, you start with an owner operator business. You open this gym to buy yourself a job. That means that until this gym can provide a full-time living for you, it cannot provide a full-time living for anybody else.

Chris Cooper (11:52):
You need to be the proof yourself. You need to prove that this gym can be successful enough to pay you a full-time wage before it can pay somebody else a full-time wage. If you are not making a good income from your gym yet, do not hire anybody else as a full-time employee because you would be inserting somebody else’s life into an imperfect system. Let’s call it that. So prove it. Prove that you can make long-term careers at your gym by making yourself the first long term, full-time, career employee. So here’s my four hard-won rules for staff to summarize: First, tell ’em what you want them to do in advance instead of just punishing them for making the wrong choice later. Super guilty of this many times over. Second, hire for the job you want instead of the people that you have.

Chris Cooper (12:42):
Again, I’m super, super guilty of this. It’s tough to resist hiring your friends. Third, don’t incentivize for things beyond their control. My brain is mathematical, so I understand this inherently, but I do see a lot of people adding sales or revenue or client-headcount bonuses to staff who have no way to control that outcome. Fourth, don’t hire full-time staff until you’re making a full-time wage yourself. Look, I get it. You wanna keep your buddies around. You want to keep your coaches fulfilled. You’re willing to defer and defer and defer your own success for that. But you have to prove that your gym can make a meaningful full-time career by proving it on yourself first. I’m Chris Cooper. I hope this helps. If you wanna ask questions about this podcast or just chat about it, go to gymownersunited.com. That’ll reroute you to a free public Facebook group just for gym owners, where we talk about this stuff in confidence. We’ve already weeded out all the bad seeds. Actually, we’ve culled like 1,500 people from this group already. So it’s a positive, caring, empathetic environment where you can ask any question that you want and you’ll get meaningful, thoughtful, caring responses. Hope it helps.

The post Four Hard-Won Rules for Staffing in a Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Open a Gym With Dozens of Members on Day 1

Mike Warkentin: (00:02)
This is Two-Brain Radio. Please hit subscribe wherever you’re watching or listening. And I thank you for doing so. I’m Mike Warkentin and I’m here with gym owner and certified Two-Brain fitness business mentor, Chris Plentus. He owns Kanna Fitness in Ambler, Pennsylvania. He recently moved locations. He did it in style. He had 160 new leads, 84 sales appointments, 76 of those people showed up and he had a huge close rate, which resulted in the numbers that you just heard. Way more members, way more revenue. Now, this didn’t just happen. Chris followed a specific plan that was created to help gyms launch with lots of members and reach profitability fast. Back when I started my gym, I was losing money for a long time. I started with about 15 members and lost money. That doesn’t have to happen anymore. Chris used it when he switched locations, but this plant has also helped brand new gyms launch with 40, 50, 60 or more members.

Mike Warkentin: (00:52)
I think the current record right now is 94. So imagine that: opening on day one, profitable and thriving with almost a hundred members. So this plan can work for you. It is called the Founders Club. That is the basis of it. Chris runs a slightly different version because he moved locations. He didn’t start a brand new gym, but the Founders Club is the basis of it. You can find all about it here with me and Chris, but here is a secret. You can find the exact details of that plan in Chris Cooper’s book, “Start a Gym”. You can find that on StartAGym.com. We’ll put the link in the description or show notes. The site also has free resources, including a Founders Club sample social media post, and an exact Founders Club timeline. The stuff is worth money, but you get it for free if you go to that site. Finally, on that site, you can sign up for the “Start A Gym” course. That’s gonna help you find success fast. So Chris, you moved locations and ran a program that added 70 new members in three months.

Chris Plentus: (01:50)
Yep. We ran a founders club 2.0, we moved from a space that was 2200 square feet to 5,500 square feet during the pandemic and we added 70 members.

Mike Warkentin: (02:00)
Like, day one at that new location, you’re plus-70 members because of one program.

Chris Plentus: (02:05)
We extended the Founders Club 2.0, which builds on the principles of the standard Founders Club. But because this wasn’t a brand new gym, we were just simply moving to a bigger location, I wanted to use the principles of Founders Club, but also offer something to my current membership. So we extended that Founder’s Club a little bit into when we were first operating into the bigger space, but yeah, for the most part, over the span of about three months added 70 members.

Mike Warkentin: (02:35)
And I’m guessing that came with a significant revenue bump. Did it not?

Chris Plentus: (02:39)
It did. We went from about $18,000 from February of 2021 monthly revenue to over 30,000, about 33,000.

Mike Warkentin: (02:52)
Okay. Okay. So listeners are gonna want details. I’m gonna dig into this with you. So Chris, details. Let’s get right into this. Start from the top and run me through this process of how you got these numbers.

Chris Plentus: (03:02)
Yep. So we were planning on moving to a brand new spot, mostly to have more space. Of course, then the pandemic hit so our construction got delayed, but then it picked back up during the pandemic. So we did move to a bigger space. When we were moving, I wanted to take advantage of the excitement of moving to a brand new space. So working with mentees who are opening a brand new gym, they should go absolutely go through the standard Founders Club, because it’s all about getting members, getting recurring revenue going. And so I use that template for brand new people, but moving to a bigger location, you also wanna keep in mind your current members. So at first I wasn’t actually gonna offer anything to current members. I was only running the standard Founders Club found in our lessons.

Chris Plentus: (03:52)
But then I got members, seed clients asking me how they could either contribute, how they could help, if they could get a t-shirt ’cause everybody loves a t-shirt. And so when enough seed clients asked me about how they could get involved, I had to come up with something. So what I did was basically come up with a tiered system, bronze, silver, gold platinum levels, and had different things at each level for current members. So at the bottom level, for like 50 bucks, it was a t-shirt. And then we did raffle tickets, which I’ll explain in a minute. You know, the next level had the t-shirt, the raffle tickets, but more raffle tickets. And then at some point for the gold, we introduced a 30 minute PT session and then I didn’t think anybody was gonna buy the highest level, but I wanted to kind of shoot for the moon and also just be able to price anchor people’s expectations, you know, for pricing psychology.

Chris Plentus: (04:52)
So I had a thousand dollar offer. It included the t-shirt, a hundred raffle tickets and it also included a Rogue barbell with anything that they wanted on it, like their name or some quote or whatever. I honestly did not expect anybody to get those, but we had four members purchase that. And two of them actually said that they didn’t even want a barbell. And so the amount of people that came out for our current membership, we had about 40% of our current membership bought one of those levels. And that added about $7,000 of revenue that wouldn’t have otherwise been included. So…

Mike Warkentin: (05:39)
Just for your existing members who are already there paying for your services?

Chris Plentus: (05:42)
Already paying for services, you know, the thing that you gotta consider with current members is that you don’t wanna necessarily, you know, it doesn’t help the business if you’re offering free things to them, because they’re already sold, they’re already in. And so how can you offer them higher end things, but still be able to make some money from them? The raffle ticket was something that we’ve done at our actual grand opening back five years ago when we first opened. And so we brought back the raffle ticket idea. The idea is that you can offer higher end things like personal training sessions and supplement packs. And one of the raffles was design a workout of the day. And one of our platinum level members put all hundred raffle tickets into that design a workout bucket because he just really wanted to make a workout. And he also refused to get a barbell. So like, the generosity from current membership was incredible.

Mike Warkentin: (06:42)
So what I’m seeing here is like, you’ve got people, they know you’re moving locations, they obviously know and trust you and they wanna support you. So that’s great. Right away, they’re in to a degree that you didn’t even see coming even better. They want the t-shirt, right. So they’re doing free advertising for it by wearing this t-shirt. Yep. And then you’ve got PT sessions, which like, that’s great for them and great for you, but it also allows you to start promoting hybrid programs. Maybe some people who’ve never done PT, maybe do some PT and enjoy it. I’m guessing that that really exposes a program for you. And then you’ve got, of course, the seed clients, the super clients who just want to basically give you a thousand dollars and buy some raffle tickets, get a t-shirt and don’t even want the barbell. So that’s a huge win. 

Chris Plentus: (07:25)
Yep. We actually had more people buy the gold level than the silver level, the gold level, because it included a PT session. And the silver did not. So more people skipped the silver level and went for the gold, which is 200 bucks, which included a 30 minute PT session, because that they saw the value in the coaching. And I imagine with COVID and everything, people being more apt to do some more private training, but even our current group members, more of them moved over to a hybrid of group and PT. And I have to imagine that was a part of it. Them realizing the value of PT.

Mike Warkentin: (08:00)
Yeah. Everybody I talked to who has a high average revenue per member- ARM in Two-Brain terms- has a hybrid program, which is, you know, nutrition plus group, PT plus nutrition, or some combination of all of those things, whatever it is. And they get clients who are paying like three, four, $500 a month, which is amazing for the gym and for the client because the client gets results. So that covers, you know, what you did for your existing members. Now, some of the listeners here really wanna know, they’re thinking about opening a gym and think, well, starting a gym. What did you do to get all these new people interested in your facility and get such a huge number of leads? Signups, shows, and then actual members out of it.

Chris Plentus: (08:36)
Yep. So I had already been part of Two-Brain for a couple years. And I also did not open my gym following the exact Two-Brain Founders Club because I wasn’t part of Two-Brain. So I went back and I looked and went through the Founders Club modules and followed it to a T, setting up the landing page, setting up ads, using Two-Brain’s swipe files, ad copy, stock photos. So the only things that I changed was some of the language around what the offer was. So instead of either a six week challenge or a 90 day challenge or something to that effect, it was to join Founders Club. And so from that, we had over the span of, I went through back and ran my numbers for March through June of 2021, because I started the advertising in mid-March of that year and then ended it in the beginning of June. We had 116 leads. And then from that, about 70 people joined.

Mike Warkentin: (09:40)
That’s a big number. I mean, that’s obviously a huge drop off, right? We’ll see marketing numbers, which I got a hundred leads, 30 of them booked appointments, 15 showed up and like four, and I’m just making those numbers up, but it’s not uncommon to see big drop offs from advertising campaigns, from the leads to the actual signups. You managed to carry high percentages all the way through.

Chris Plentus: (10:00)
Yes. And I would absolutely caveat that with saying again like the vaccines were coming out, people were feeling more comfortable being around others and joining groups. So I don’t think these are, they certainly are not guaranteed results, but what I can say is that by following the lessons in our modules, and then also bumping up a little bit of my ad spend because I was comfortable at like five to $10 a day, I went to 20, which at the time seemed like a lot, but looking back, it’s really not much at all. That definitely helped generate interest. And then, you know, piggybacking on this excitement of opening up in a new place that is huge, whether it’s a brand new gym, or if you’re opening up in a brand new space, people love to be part of something.

Chris Plentus: (10:47)
People love to be part of a dream. And if you can illustrate that and paint that picture and then bring people in while you’re fitting the place out, it just creates this excitement that a kind of standard offer throughout the year doesn’t give you. So I think the combination of all of those things definitely helped. We definitely had a lot of people come in that were very interested in personal training. So we, of course, would present some of our onboarding for anyone interested in group, but we had people also interested in hybrid and one-on-one. So among all of those people that joined, we brought in about 17,000 in front end revenue over the course of those three months, which obviously definitely helped with the pandemic drop that we experienced.

Mike Warkentin: (11:37)
Yeah. And I’m gonna guess you said front end revenue, which is the nice thing, but your retention I’m sure is pretty good. So you’re getting backend revenue because these people are staying because they love you and you’re doing a great job, right? So this is really a huge value play that exists for months and probably years in your case with great retention.

Chris Plentus: (11:54)
Yep. And I went through, cause I was also thinking like, oh, maybe my numbers are skewed because we had a lot of returning members, people who quit during the pandemic. And then they decided to just join up and just kind of jumped back into class. But when I ran my numbers and I looked at the people who were coming in, out of those about 70 people, only about 20 of them were returning members. So the remaining 50 were brand new people who were either paying for our onboarding process that we call base camp or jumping straight to one-on-one PT or some combination of the two. And then out of those 70, over half of them are still with us to this day.

Mike Warkentin: (12:34)
There you go. So that’s front end revenue, backend revenue. The retention is great. This is a huge thing for your gym. Listeners, if you wanted to know more about the Founders Club, visit StartAGym.com. You can certainly click out of this show, go there right now and get those free resources. We’re gonna give you a few more details about it. So Chris, tell me about what you gave people in this Founders Club. And the thing that I always like is, you go to any rock concert and you see there’s a couple of guys in the back in leather jackets and they’re just like, ah, I saw ’em before they were cool. You know, and they’re wearing the t-shirt from the first album, kind of thing. The Founders Club has a bit of that element where it’s like that, like you said, you kind of wanna be there on day one, you have the thing that you have to earn.

Mike Warkentin: (13:13)
You can’t buy it. There is a lot of sort of status that goes with it. And the cool part about this is that it doesn’t cost the gym a ton of time and effort, but it really has a huge effect on the psychology of members. And it does create this, like, I’m invested, I helped kind of situation. So what did you give away in your Founder’s Club and create value for these people? Because one of the things that we talk about at Two-Brain a lot of times, don’t discount things, right? Like discounting memberships off the bat can be just this gunshot wound that bleeds you out for the rest of your life, paid in full, like, ah, had someone pay for a lifetime membership, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. Do not do that. What did you do to add value without gutting your business?

Chris Plentus: (13:51)
Yep. Yeah. Talking with mentees or opening a gym, definitely do not recommend discounting their ongoing memberships. So what you wanna do is you want to add value. You want to basically have a value stack where the value of the package of something that they were gonna receive is gonna be more than their standard membership. So the t-shirt is definitely a common thing that people will give away. So yes, there’s a cost of buying shirts, but there’s also the amount that you pay for the shirt versus the value that you’re presenting to the member. Right. At the time, because of the pandemic, there was that collective of companies that were kind of giving away these gift cards. So you got like 20 bucks to each of these companies. So we got a stack of those.

Chris Plentus: (14:38)
We included those. So that was a hundred dollars value. We also advertise our biometric scan, so we have an Inbody machine. So we said that was a $45 value. And then we also have these duffle bags that are branded with our gym logo and name, shaker bottle, similarly branded, and then supplement samples. And so we said that was, you know, a 30 to $40 value. And so when you add it all up, we said, Hey, you’re gonna get an extra $200 worth of stuff in addition to this gym membership that it seems like you’ve been thinking about already. So why not get in, when we build our landing page, when we’re talking with people, we say that we’re looking for 10 founding members, so that creates some scarcity there. And then you also put a deadline on it. So you say, Hey, this is only gonna be open for a certain amount of time. After that, the software won’t be around. So you’re not trying to trick people. But what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to encourage them to do the thing that they already want to do, and do it in a timely manner that helps both them, and of course, you, as a business.

Mike Warkentin: (15:41)
Let’s be real. You’re changing their lives. Like we all know this as gym owners, that your program works, you’re not doing a bait and switch. You’re not offering them, you know, 40 pounds in two days or whatever the nonsense is. Correct. You know that you can help these people, you know that they want in, all you’re doing is just helping them make that decision and stick to it rather than waver and go back to old habits that are not gonna benefit their health and fitness. When you laid this stuff out, so you listed a whole bunch of stuff that you’re giving away. Well, not giving away, the whole bunch of stuff that you’re including with a Founder’s Club membership. Did you actually lay out that value piece by piece to them and say like, Hey, this is this, this is this, $200 value.

Chris Plentus: (16:16)
Yep. So the landing page, and then we’re talking about for a standards Founder Club. So this does not have to apply only to Founders Club 2.0. Anybody who’s opening a gym or moving to a new space. This is what you would put on a landing page. So you lay out every single item, you put the dollar amount in parentheses past it. But then at the top, what you’re doing is you’re saying, the words I use is, we’re expanding, looking for 10 founding members to reserve a spot at Kanna Fitness 2.0, you’ll snag over $200 in free extras. And then it includes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then of course the last thing should be something like bragging rights, which is priceless.

Mike Warkentin: (16:53)
That’s important, laying that number out because you know what it’s worth, right. You know the stuff in your head, but the average person, if you don’t lay out those numbers, they don’t know what you’re including there. They’re just like, ah, this stuff, that stuff, whatever. When you lay it out, and I’ve seen this done, it starts to stack up. It starts to have a snowball effect. And people start to realize that there’s some free stuff. And how many times have, you’ve been out shopping when, you know, ah, buy two, get one free. You’re like, I’m in, right, like that extra value, that’s something for nothing. Quote, unquote. That idea works. It’s worked in sales probably since caveman were selling rocks, right? Like it works. People want more stuff. They want added value. I remember being at the Arnold sports festival in Columbus, Ohio, and it was in the vendor room. And I remember walking past these endless lines of shredded people waiting in line. And I remember somebody saying, what are we waiting in line for? And someone says, I have no idea, but it’s free and it’s gotta be awesome. Right. And this was just like, this mentality works. So laying that out is super, super important.

Chris Plentus: (17:53)
The other thing. Yeah, go ahead. I wanna just say one thing. The other thing that people, when they’re thinking about offering a Founder’s Club, don’t pigeonhole people into, or don’t offer something that is only related to group or only related to PT. So with a Founders Club with tangible items, I like that for a couple reasons. Number one, you can give that to somebody who’s coming in for group. You can give that to somebody who’s coming in for PT. You can give that to somebody who’s coming in for hybrid or even nutrition only, right? So it’s service agnostic. You still wanna go in with the mentality that when someone’s coming in, you’re gonna do a No-Sweat Intro. You’re gonna do the standard sales process and make a prescription based on whatever it is you feel like is best for that person. So you’re not creating a Founder’s Club only for a group or only for PT.

Chris Plentus: (18:38)
So having tangible items is nice. The other reason I like tangible items is because people can take a picture of it. You can take a picture of it and post on social media, but also people can take a picture of it and then post it to their socials and create this effect of marketing for you. So even if you offer something that’s a service or something like a biometric scan, which you’re obviously not giving the machine to them, but what I like to do for something like that is either print out or get a certificate and have some sort of tangible way to represent whatever that service is. So there’s a certificate for an Inbody biometric scan. You put the dollar amount below that, $45 value, and then they have to hand that in to you. So in addition to something that they can take a picture of with the other goodies that they get, it’s also a way to keep track of people and what kind of services they’re receiving. So whether it’s a free PT session or a free biometric scan, print gift certificates out, because it’s easier, both from a marketing perspective and also a way for you to keep track of who has what, because not that I think people would really do this, but theoretically, they could keep coming back every month and be like, oh, I need a biometric scan. I want a biometric scan, right? So that’s just a tip in terms of both a marketing play, but also a way to keep track of what people are actually getting.

Mike Warkentin: (20:03)
And you’re right though, because if you just say, oh, I’ve got a free biometric scan. You forget about that. You don’t use it or whatever. Actually having a physical thing, A, the business can track it. But B, the person actually feels like this is a thing. And I talked to a gym owner who had a very high end VIP card that he used. And it was a physical thing that was like presented as precious. And it felt precious when his members received it to refer their friends. And mm-hmm, it’s, he showed it to me. It looks like a black Visa or Visa gold, you know, or one of those high end Visa cards. Right. It’s thick. It’s glossy, the whole deal.

Chris Plentus: (20:36)
Yeah. It’s not something they’re just gonna throw away.

Mike Warkentin: (20:38)
Exactly. They’re actually put it in their wallet probably next to their actual credit card and they’re gonna use it at some point. So that’s a great tip. And then the tip that I’ll throw is the one you said, you know, showcase this stuff, show it off on social media. And don’t just put, take a picture of a t-shirt, get your most photogenic members to put it on and then have them smile and away you go. Social proof, herd mentality works. I am looking at the Founders Club timeline that is available for free on StartAGym.com. Did you follow this or did you make some variations to it?

Chris Plentus: (21:05)
I pretty much followed it to a T, I think I might have opened it up a little bit earlier. I’m trying to think. So we got into the space in the beginning of May. I opened up Founders Club middle of March. So about a month and a half. So yeah, that actually lines up. And then some people will choose to close their Founders Club the day that they start operating. Other people will extend that past the actual soft opening day. And maybe they have a grand opening a couple weeks later. Which is totally fine because the fact is when you’re first opening, all you’re trying to do is just start. And you’re just trying to recognize that there are systems to be built and documented. And for someone looking to join the gym, sometimes they do wanna come in and see it operating and then they’ll join. So I tell my mentees who are, I’ve had several that have opened gyms, you know, feel free to extend that Founder’s Club. Especially if it’s got the juice, if it’s still running and people are still interested in it, if it’s working, don’t cut it off. So yes, there is something to be said about the scarcity and the time aspect. But you also don’t wanna cut yourself off from taking advantage of people who are interested in joining the gym.

Mike Warkentin: (22:21)
Yeah. And I’m looking at this thing, it’s exactly right. Three to four months, its timeline. It’s a seven page document, three to four months out. It has everything from like bring coffee to local businesses. It’s got social media campaigns in there. It’s got background work. It tells you about the offer and all sorts of different stuff. Exactly what you said about laying it out. It’s got everything. So go in there, again, StartAGym.com. That’s where you’re gonna get this thing. We could literally sell this thing. I’m not totally sure why we’re giving it away for free. So you need to go get it. It is worth money. The thing that I wanna ask you, Chris, is a big one for gym owners who are trying to start, how much work was the Founders Club? Can you put a time, like how much, ’cause we’re super busy. If we’re trying to start a gym, we’ve got permitting and the government and all this other stuff to try and do. How much work and time goes into the Founders Club? Cause to me it doesn’t look like a huge amount, but it has a huge reward. It’s work, but it doesn’t look overwhelming to me.

Chris Plentus: (23:12)
It’s not a lot of work because before you’re actually operating, you don’t have the time taken up of coaching classes or coaching PT sessions. So what are you gonna spend your time on? What you spend your time on is recognizing, yeah, is marketing basically. And recognizing that the best way to start is in a profitable state ideally. Right. And so if you can, you know, just think of any of the major franchises out there, your Orange Theories and 45s, like they have goals of having hundreds of members before they even open. We only need about, let’s say, 30 to 50 to be really profitable for our size businesses. Right. So if you can get out there and recognize that yeah, sure. There’s gonna be some decision making on the things you wanna offer. You don’t honestly even have to order the t-shirts ahead of time because the fact is I don’t want you having a huge amount of inventory on a Founder’s Club shirt, and then it says the word Founders Club, and then you have, you know, 50 extra shirts in different sizes.

Chris Plentus: (24:14)
Yeah. Right. So all you do is you say, Hey, anyone who joins, we’re gonna take your shirt size. We’re gonna order these. Once we have our actual Founders Club, that way we’re not gonna lose out on inventory and stock. So, you know, that’s not even something that you need to order ahead of time and get yourself in a hole with. So yeah, it takes some knowledge of what you wanna be doing, but that’s why we created these guides for you to shortcut that. And it also requires you to market it. So a lot of people think that because they post it once or twice that everyone in the world has seen it and everyone that they want has seen it. But the fact is we need to keep posting and posting and posting to the point where we’re probably sick of the content that we are posting, only because we know that somebody may have only seen it the most recent time you posted it. So basically over communicating whatever offer it is that you have, where you think you’re posting too much. But the fact is for anyone outside and public looking in, it’s probably a very normal amount, especially for any sort of marketing campaign.

Mike Warkentin: (25:18)
The only people who see all your social media are the people who post it. I guarantee that all your followers do not see your stuff. You could post the same thing every day and new people would see it. I guarantee that because of the way algorithms work, because of the volume of stuff on social media, keep posting, follow our timeline. I’ll say that again. Follow the instructions. It’s not made up. It does work, stick to the plan. Okay, Chris, I apologize, I said the name of your gym wrong in the intro. My apologies. It’s Kanna, correct?

Chris Plentus: (25:47)
Yeah. Kanna Fitness. It’s an Icelandic word for explorer and also pot of coffee.

Mike Warkentin: (25:52)
Okay. So my apologies on that, but when you opened it originally, were you profitable on day one?

Chris Plentus: (25:58)
We were break even profitable. So I was paying myself a couple hundred bucks the first month, because that was something that I did. I had already been following all of Two-Brain’s podcasts and Coop already had one or two books out at the time. So I knew to pay myself and I had enough to pay myself. But I mean, by no means was I killing it. I definitely needed to build that membership up.

Mike Warkentin: (26:25)
For sure. So if you had paid yourself what we’ll call the wage you’re paying now, your gym would not have been profitable on day one.

Chris Plentus: (26:32)
Oh, no way. No way. No, I don’t even know if I made what I pay myself now in the total revenue. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin: (26:38)
Could you go back in time, if you had put the Founders Club in place back in time and started with that, what do you think would’ve happened?

Chris Plentus: (26:45)
Completely different ballgame. I mean, I was in 2200 square feet, my rent was only 1800 bucks. Right. So like part of the overall strategy was to start small and then build up. Nice. So I benefited from a lot of the old school gym owners that I talk to, and picking their brains about this. Right. But looking back, I mean, I had a bit of an audience ’cause I was coaching at other local gyms. And so I had people that were ready to go. So I kind of had an organic Founders Club, but if I actually put into practice what Two-Brain now teaches and has codified into what we now call Founders Club, man. Sky’s the limit. I mean, I opened with 20 something, mid 20, in terms of membership, but I could’ve easily opened with over 50 and moved in, had I had the funds to move into a bigger space even sooner.

Mike Warkentin: (27:40)
It would’ve shaved years off the evolution of the gym. I wouldn’t have as much gray hair if I had done it back in 2010 when I opened my gym, we’ll put it that way. right. It might be retired,

Chris Plentus: (27:50)
But it’s also, yeah, like I told my mentees, like the compounding effects of even a thousand extra dollars a month is incredible. Like a lot of people focus on a thousand dollars extra a month. But when you look at it over a year, that’s actually $12,000 over that year, let alone the future years. So even though $500 thousand dollars, certainly more than that is, you know, gonna be seen as a good amount. You have to realize the compounding effects. So if in a year you want to be making 24,000 extra dollars to help pay for someone else’s salary or staff member. Well that’s only $2,000 a month. That’s not a lot of money. So any sort of leg up that you can get or any sort of shortcut that you can learn from people who’ve been there done that, which is why I believe in mentorship, because it’s really a shortcut to not making the mistakes that a lot of us have already made. That is the real benefit. So yeah, so many people open up and they have no idea what they’re doing and they just expect people to show up. And it’s like in this day and age, especially 2022, you cannot rely on just if I build it, they will come.

Mike Warkentin: (28:58)
It is a myth. Have you with your mentees, have you seen anyone implement the Founders Club?

Chris Plentus: (29:03)
I literally have two mentees that are opening gyms. So yeah, they have double digit members, which is great. But they’re keeping the Founders Club open because we talked about the idea that you wanna ride the wave of excitement and you want people to come in and see it. So yeah.

Mike Warkentin: (29:22)
And we have seen this done. Again, Chris Cooper’s written over in the book “Start a Gym”. We have seen for years, many, many gyms use this plan, which has been improved over time. Since it first appeared, it’s always adjusted to be better. As it goes, we’ve seen double digit numbers and some of the big ones are approaching a hundred. So we’re getting gyms that are doing that. Not guaranteeing you’ll get a hundred members, but you are gonna get a bunch of members that you would not have gotten. Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story here. I really appreciate it and I hope the new location goes really well for you.

Chris Plentus: (29:55)
Thanks. Yeah. It’s great. We have a very strong kids program. So to be able to run kids’ classes concurrently while their parents are working out in the adult group class on the other side of the gym is amazing. We’re happy.

Mike Warkentin: (30:06)
Listeners. You might be able to work with Chris if you want. He’s also a mentor. That was Chris on Two-Brain Radio. Start a gym, StartAGym.com. Go there, get the stuff, take a look at it. You can get Chris’s book. You can get free resources. You can also sign up for the Start A Gym course. These things will help you. They will take tons and tons of time off your developers. As a gym owner, you will go further, faster than if you just do it on your own. Check it out. StartAGym.com. Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Please hit subscribe on your way out wherever you’re watching or listening. Now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper: (30:44)
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. The Gym Owners United Facebook group has more than 5,600 members and it’s growing daily. If you aren’t benefiting from the free tips and tactics and resources that I post daily in that group, what are you waiting for? Get in there and grow your business. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or www.GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.

The post How to Open a Gym With Dozens of Members on Day 1 appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

When a Client Deadlifts in a Thong and People Are Upset

Would you let someone do hamstring curls or deadlifts at your gym in barely there swimwear?

The issue arose in Australia in September, when “fitness influencer” Andréa Sunshine wore the smallest of bikinis for her glute-focused workout in a globo gym filled with people who were wearing more traditional workout clothing.

The whole thing was filmed and posted to Instagram, and a News.com.au article reported that an unapologetic Sunshine said the gym manager actually asked her to train in a separate room.

We’re not here to debate freedom of expression, personal rights, fitness influencers with only-fans accounts or anything like that.

Gym owners just need to know what to do with people who don’t fit.

If you care to dig into the Australian apparel issue, you can check out Sunshine’s borderline-not-safe-for-work Instagram account here or read the News.com.au article here: “Ripped Grandma Breaks ‘Gym Protocol’ With Racy Workout Outfit.”

On the Two-Brain blog this week, Chris Cooper has been talking about how to deal with clients who aren’t a good fit for your gym.

Short summary: You don’t need every single client and should refer poor fits to other gyms that can serve them better.

That’s a simple, effective plan that’s been used by many gym owners to remove “weed clients” so they can focus on “seed clients.” Still, entrepreneurs sometimes struggle to implement the plan for a host of reasons, including:

“My gym is unprofitable and I need the money.”“I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”“Maybe I’m the problem and should just suck it up.”“Maybe I can just accommodate the behavior even though it bothers me and other clients.”

If you think things like this, you aren’t alone. Every gym owner does.

In fact, we regularly see questions like this in our support group for clients: “This gym member wants to do X. It doesn’t fit with my vision for the gym. Is there any way I can make it work?”

Such questions don’t arise because the gym owners are dumb, spineless or unfocused. Far from it. These are some of the best gym owners in the world. The problem is that they started businesses to help people, and they want to serve everyone while building profitable businesses.

When these questions appear, it’s fantastic to see peers pop in with advice. The objective perspective of another person who runs the exact same kind of business is invaluable. Many peers in the group have already dealt with the exact same situation and can offer great advice based on actual experience.

Below a recent post about potentially accommodating a member who was pushing the gym owner’s limits, I saw stuff like this:

“Hold the line.”“Make it black and white for all.”“Hard pass.”“Stay strong.”

A few people went even further and offered constructive solutions to the problem based on their own experiences with a similar problem. Overall, our community provided great ways to address the situation as well as support and encouragement. For the original poster, the responses were no doubt comforting and confirmation that they should stick to their vision for the gym.

Beyond encouragement, gym owners also need exact plans to solve problems. Two-Brain has those, too. Here are two resources for dealing with sticky situations and one that will help you prevent them from popping up:

“Not Every Client Is a Good Fit for Your Business”“The Easy Way to Fire a Gym Client”“Protect Your Gym With a Code of Conduct”

The full complement of resources—the support of a community, step-by-step action plans and the one-on-one guidance of a mentor—makes huge, confusing, time-sucking problems much easier to deal with.

Are You Prepared for Thongs?

So a client just showed up to your gym to do high-rep deadlifts and GHD sit-ups in a thong.

Your other clients are clearly very uncomfortable.

Do you have a plan?

If you don’t, book a call to talk about how a mentor can help you solve any problem in your business.

The post When a Client Deadlifts in a Thong and People Are Upset appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Easy Way to Fire a Gym Client

Chris Cooper (00:02):
What do you do when a client is stinky? What do you do if a client falls in love with one of your coaches or complains too much or posts negative stuff on social media? What do you do if a client is a great person but not a great fit for your gym, I’m Chris Cooper. And today I’m gonna tell you the answer to these questions and give you a great solution for those clients who maybe aren’t a great fit. If you wanna chat about this episode with me, go to Gymownersunited.com. That’ll redirect you to our public Facebook group, where you can ask questions about this episode or any episode on Two-Brain Radio or anything pertaining to owning a gym. I’m in there. The team of mentors from Two-Brain are in there. And around once a day, we like to comb through and just help people out for free. That’s our mission and Gymownersunited.com is where we do that. Today, I’m gonna talk about what we call “weed clients.” These aren’t bad people, but they’re a bad fit for your gym. What do you do with them? I had this experience around 2009: My gym needed money, and I had a great client. She was a personal training client, regular recurring client, great person, very well connected in the community. And she was absolutely enamored with one of our coaches. I don’t just mean a fan. I mean very over the top, enamored beyond the scope of what is acceptable. And of course he was married and not open to these advances. And these advances became clearer and clearer and more obvious and more overt. And we had to finally say, “Look, we can’t have her in the gym.” We had to say, “It’s not you. It’s me.”

Chris Cooper (01:39):
And even when the client makes it easy for you by making negative posts or complaining or talking over your coaches or being late or being stinky, it’s still hard to say goodbye to any client, good or bad. It’s even harder to say “we’re not a good fit” to a prospective client who comes in the door—and especially when you need money. As a people pleaser, I’ve struggled with saying “no thanks” to people my whole life, but I’ve finally found a way to do it: I refer imperfect fits somewhere else. And today I’m gonna tell you how. So first I want you to remember that when you refer a client somewhere else, you’re still serving the client, right? So I decided in the case of the previous client to just find her a new home. I would go out of my way, do my research, do my diligence to actually find her a place to land.

Chris Cooper (02:31):
So I called around to the other local gyms. I introduced myself and I asked about their programs. And so finally I found one that I thought could really help her. I called them up and said, “I have this client. She’s amazing, but she’s not a good fit here. She has a $270 credit at my gym. I would like to transfer that to you and get her started with you right away.” Well, of course they were suspicious. Right? What kind of monster was I dumping on their doorstep? I just told them, “Hey, look, if you don’t like her, you can just refund her the balance. Okay?” And so they agreed. And the client wasn’t exactly thrilled that I was referring her out, but it was better than being dumped by my gym completely. She tried the other gym. She liked it, and she lost 70 more pounds in the next two years there. It was a win for us. It was a win for them and it was a win for the client. So the last service that I could perform as her coach was to give her a way to continue her path to fitness, even if it wasn’t with us. But the experience opened my eyes to the value of a referral partner. I was no longer afraid to say “you’re not a great fit for our program” because I didn’t have to hurt anyone’s feelings anymore. And that meant that I could work only with clients who were a perfect match for my coaches and my gym. So here’s how to find a referral partner in your town. Number one, grab a piece of paper here. We’re gonna work through this. Grab a pen, too. I’m old school, but you can type this in your notes or your phone or whatever. So Step 1: make a list of all of the coaching practices in your town.

Chris Cooper (04:03):
These are people who are offering the same service coaching that you are. Step 2: pick the five gyms who can care for your poor fits the best, right? The five best gyms other than your own, because of course you’re the best. The five gyms that you would join if for some reason you sold your gym or stopped owning a gym. Now you’re not looking for technical expertise necessarily. You’re looking for somebody who can demonstrate care for that client and orient their service to that client’s goals. In other words, you’re viewing the person through the eyes of the potential client. Now, a lot of us have something that’s called “the technician’s curse,” right? We think that the more technical knowledge, certifications, stuff like that that we have, the better the trainer. That’s not necessarily true. Some clients will do way better with a very empathetic but less-educated coach.

Chris Cooper (04:56):
So think about this through the eyes of the client. Next, visit the websites of the five top gyms from your list. If you’re in a small town and there are only three gyms, pick like one or two and keep going through these exercises. Visit their website, then call the top one or two or three of them and ask if you can drop by with coffee. Then drop by with coffee. Literally do it. Show up, give them a coffee and say that you want to refer the clients who aren’t a good fit. Don’t try to set up a contract. Don’t try to set up a reciprocal agreement. Don’t try to partner with this gym and nobody else and exclude everybody else. Just say “I have clients who might be a better fit with you” and then ask them “would you welcome those clients if I sent them to you?” And that’s it. Again, do not try to set up cross-referral fees or some other kind of exclusive deal. This should be a win for the client and the other gym. Your win is not financial. Your win is maintaining the cultural integrity of your gym by moving people out who aren’t a great fit. And the more successful your gym is, the more picky you have to be about people that you choose to include in your community. It’s really hard to remove clients who aren’t a good fit because none of us likes to hurt a client’s feelings. So we keep them around. We receive their private texts and DMs with dread. We keep a suspicious eye on them when they’re around. We harbor a grudge. We keep things in the back of our mind like, “Hey, that guy owes me money” when we’re working with other clients.

Chris Cooper (06:31):
In theory, firing a client is easy, but in practice firing a client is really super-duper hard. I used to try and keep every client or take every person who wanted to join my gym, even when I didn’t need the money anymore. I just didn’t wanna say no and hurt their feelings. But then I learned the value of a referral partner and my life got 300% easier. And then one day my partner referred someone to my gym. That was a bonus. The real win is working only with the clients that I love to serve and surrounding myself with people I can serve. So I’ve got a video that I’ll link in the show notes on how to identify and focus on your “seed clients.” These are your best clients. I’ve got to share one more example with you of how this went wrong.

Chris Cooper (07:21):
So I had this client who was a competitive athlete, and she joined our gym. We were a CrossFit gym, and she really wanted to do CrossFit, and she wanted to compete at CrossFit. And so for the first year, all of her athletic habits served her really well. She was insanely disciplined. She was a super fan. She dove all in. She became a big evangelist for my gym. She posted all kinds of stuff on social media about how Catalyst had changed or saved her life or whatever. She learned how to eat better. She learned how to perform better, but eventually things took a turn, and she began looking for outside programming because she wanted to be quote-unquote “more competitive.” And she started following these coaches who had been to the Games but didn’t really have successful gyms. And she wanted to do extra programming, and she wanted to come in between classes, and she wanted to spend three hours a day at the gym.

Chris Cooper (08:13):
You know this story. I don’t have to tell it to you. And eventually what that led to was this feeling or this sensation that she was different from other people. Maybe she was a better athlete than other people and needed different things. But that eventually led to this feeling of isolation between her and the other members. So they would see her coming in at the end of their class and warming up to do her secret-squirrel programming. And she would kind of stay outta their way, but you know, maybe she’d bang things around, and she would push the boundary of what was acceptable in the gym. You know, for example, we don’t allow people to show up on their own time and just do their own thing. That’s not what a coaching practice is about. And so eventually these things heightened, and it finally reached a point where the other members didn’t really want her there, and she didn’t really want to be there.

Chris Cooper (09:02):
And so after one confrontation with one of our coaches, I went into my office. I found out exactly how many months or sessions she’d bought in advance. I wrote that dollar amount out on a check and put it in an envelope, went to visit her where she was warming up. And I just said, “Hey, look, this is not working out. This relationship isn’t making either of us happy. Here’s the remainder of your funds. Godspeed. I wish you all the best.” And she was flabbergasted. She couldn’t believe that any business would ever give a client a refund and not wanna work with them anymore. And I think that personal shock hit her really hard. I think if I had said “here is a better gym for you” or “here’s a guy that does CrossFit competitive training in his garage” and handed her off that way, she might have viewed the conversation as an ascension instead of as a demotion. And that would’ve really cushioned the blow. It would’ve made a better segue instead. What happened was she cried, she screamed and then she attacked us on social media. You could have seen that coming. Giving your clients a place to land, a place to go, a path forward instead of just a “we don’t want you anymore,” that makes the process easier for them. And making the process easier for them means that you’re more likely to do it because you are an empathetic coach who never wants to hurt anybody’s feelings, right? I know because I am you. I’m Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. And if you wanna chat through this, share client stories, talk about how you’ve offloaded poor clients and promoted your best clients, you can do that at Gymownersunited.com. Feel free to join the conversation there and talk about this podcast or any topic you like about gym ownership.

The post The Easy Way to Fire a Gym Client appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Not Every Client Is a Good Fit for Your Business

Chris Cooper (00:01):
Your future best clients might not be ready to be your clients yet. My name is Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. And if this episode is helpful to you, please hit subscribe. We track numbers to tell us what topics are helping you the most. And when we see the numbers go up, we know to produce more content on that topic for free, just like we’ve been doing for a decade. Now, today, I’m gonna talk about a conversation that I had with Bonnie Skinner, a registered psychotherapist and the founder of Level Up coaching, about why we don’t want every client, why every client is not a great fit for your business, or why the client might just not be a good fit yet. Then I’m gonna talk about something from Kenny Markwardt called “bigger isn’t better and it might be worse for your gym.” And then finally, I’m gonna give you an answer to what to do with the clients who come to talk to you but aren’t a great fit for your service yet.

Chris Cooper (00:54):
So to start with, your staff members want to do their best work. Your coaches want to work with clients that will allow them to have a meaningful impact on their health and fitness. They need to work with people who are excited to be coached, who show up with their batteries included and who can afford to pay for the services that they actually need. And that means you’re not trying to attract everyone to your gym. You might not even wanna keep everyone who’s at your gym right now. And perhaps you already know that, but it’s still easy to be distracted by the competition, right? It’s easy to slip into worry about that other dude’s rock-bottom rates or how close they are to your gym or their habit of just copying everything that you do. And I understand that it’s really easy for me to stand here and talk about having an abundance mindset and the rising tide raising all boats, but it’s hard to resist the rage you feel when somebody actually talks badly about you or leaves you a bad review or steals something that you’ve carefully built.

Chris Cooper (01:58):
So here’s what Bonnie taught me. And she calls this lesson “the goldfish.” Think about why you started your business. To help great people change their lives, right? You wanted to feed them and guide them and watch them grow. And this is the same reason that people buy fish tanks. They put these beautiful fish in these tanks that they buy. Gold ones and flashy red ones, those shimmering silver ones, and those jet-black ones. And those are the clients that you want, but not every fish in the tank is beautiful. Some of the fish are bottom feeders. Their job is to like vacuum up the algae and the fish poop and all the other stuff that you don’t want in the tank. Those fish serve an important purpose. They let the most beautiful fish flourish and swim and clear water because they let you focus on the fish that you love most.

Chris Cooper (02:50):
So here’s how it works in practice. I was sitting with Bonnie and she explained the concept to me. And I said, “Bonnie, I get it. But I hate the feeling of people being led astray by these bottom feeders, right? Like they sign up for these pyramid schemes and sell supplements because of them. They’re tricked into these expensive challenges and they waste their money. And they’re lured by garbage like training masks and these other myths. And that keeps me up at night.” And she said, “Chris, do you really do your best work with people who fall for obvious tricks? Do you want people who will be easily pulled away by slimy sales people, who will quit your gym to try the next new thing instead of sticking with the thing that works?” And I said, “Honestly, no. I do my best work with really smart people.”

Chris Cooper (03:38):
And she said, “Then let the bottom feeders do their job.” I said, “Bonnie, I feel like I’m just like abandoning people.” And she said, “Chris, how did your best clients learn to question salespeople? How did they learn to not fall for the schemes of MLM or believe the lies of the supplement companies?” And I laughed and I said, “Well, just like me. They probably fell for somebody’s pitch. And they learned the hard way.” “And that’s how everyone learned,” she said. “Some of your future best clients aren’t ready to be your best clients yet.” Now Bonnie is one of the most empathetic people I know, and she’s right. We don’t get to control who’s in the tank. We can only feed and care for our fish. Playing a 30-year game in gym ownership means giving yourself permission to be patient. I know that I’m gonna need 30 years to fulfill my mission in Sault Ste. Marie, which is to positively extend the lives of 7,000 people, 150 at a time, with each person staying for at least 14 months. And that means that I’m willing to wait for people to make their mistakes. I wish I could shield everyone from pain, but gym members aren’t one and done. Old members come back. Potential members who fall for the latest scam are actually better new members later because smart recognizes smart. So feed your fish and just let the ocean do its thing. Kenny Markwardt added his thoughts in a blog post that I’ll link below called “Bigger Isn’t better—And It Might Be Way Worse.” So this is from Kenny. As a gym owner, you might daydream about an enormous shiny facility, a place with room for multiple classes of 20 or more at a time and AstroTurf and lockers and a big ball pit.

Chris Cooper (05:25):
Well, I’m here to tell you that some of it might be more of a nightmare than a dream. Running a giant place like this is a Herculean task. It comes with a monumental amount of overhead and risk. And the reality is that you’re gonna have a big empty space a lot of the time. Worse, the payoff is probably not going to be as big as you think it will be. Huge spaces are very expensive to rent or buy and then fill and maintain. And so this is my addition here, the bigger your space, the more time you’re going to spend managing space, equipment, people, and the less time you’re gonna spend coaching. So back to Kenny, Kenny says that on the flip side, by maximizing a smaller facility, you’ll have less overhead and you’ll have more risk tolerance. You’ll have a big, exciting, energy-filled place that people are attracted to.

Chris Cooper (06:20):
Most importantly, you can fit more members than you think in a smaller space, and you can generate more revenue than you think, too. For example, Kenny’s gym is housed in less than 4,000 square feet. That space supports around 250 members, three full-time coaches, group classes, kids programs, personal training and nutrition. And though it’s one tempting to wanna go bigger. Here are the reasons why Kenny so strongly believes in staying in a smaller facility. First is versatility in a smaller space. You can easily manage the inevitable ebb and flow of business ownership. As you go from startup to thriving enterprise, you’ll grow in the good times and you’ll easily manage the bad times along the way. Kenny says that his space is large enough to allow them to generate a great income and support a staff of professional coaches. But it’s small enough that he would survive a mass exodus or another pandemic.

Chris Cooper (07:13):
So when COVID hit, Kenny says that he realized he could still be remarkably profitable by retaining just a third of his clients and making a few adjustments. Luckily he didn’t have to, but it was a huge relief to run the numbers and know that he was gonna be okay. The next thing that Kenny loves about a smaller space is the energy. Have you ever been to an empty restaurant or a nightclub? It’s terrible. You feel like something is wrong and you wonder where everybody else is. With a big space. There will be many times when only a few people are training, just like an empty restaurant. Your gym will feel hollow. Worse, you’re paying rent for space that you’re just not using much. People are attracted to the energy of other people. Full classes create a fun, buzzing environment that people wanna be in. And a gym that’s always full will generate great revenue per square foot.

Chris Cooper (08:05):
Kenny’s third reason is profit and overhead. This one might seem obvious, but he says he is not so sure it is. Most people recognize that their rent or their mortgage payments will be larger in a bigger space, but the other costs aren’t always obvious. A bigger space will be more expensive to heat and cool, to keep clean, to build out with more equipment and fill with gear. And all that stuff adds up fast. Finally, Kenny’s fourth point is reality. Let’s be honest. Most of us want the big, shiny facility to stoke our own egos. We wanna own one of those big juggernaut places everyone knows about. We seem to think that if we build such a place, people from far and wide will come check out how awesome we are. Fortunately for microgym owners. That’s just not the case. People come to you for coaching community and accountability.

Chris Cooper (08:55):
If they’re coming to you for a shiny, expansive space, you’re gonna lose to the globo gym down the street because they get new equipment every year. And that place is easy to keep clean because two-thirds of their members never actually work out. So Kenny says, I know you can make a six-figure income in a 4,000-square-foot facility or smaller. So it seems shortsighted to go any bigger. And it’s definitely a bad idea to get a big space without a precise plan to maximize every square inch and generate a profit that will justify that space. A mentor will help you determine exactly how much space you need. So if you’re thinking for your first or your next place, don’t think big. Think about maximizing a small space and being versatile. So now I wanna talk about what do you do with the clients who don’t fit your gym.

Chris Cooper (09:45):
I started this podcast by saying that your future best clients might not be ready to be your best clients yet. And sometimes when they come in, they’ll have an objection. Like, “Ah, you know, I can’t afford the time. I can’t afford the money. I need to check with my wife.” And really they should start a fitness program somewhere else and then come back to you because they’re not ready to be the kind of clients that you want to coach yet. Someday they might be. And then they’ll come back. You’ll keep nurturing them. You’ll keep giving them free resources. You’ll keep them in your public Facebook group. You’ll keep them on your email list until they are ready to be your client. This is a 30-year journey. Even if it takes them three years to come back, you’ll be ready and waiting for them.

Chris Cooper (10:26):
So here’s how you say to somebody who’s not a great fit “you’re not ready” or “maybe this isn’t best for us.” It’s hard to say goodbye to a bad client. And it’s even hard to say “we’re not a good fit” to a prospective client. I’m a people pleaser. And so I’ve struggled with saying “no thanks” to people my whole life, but I eventually realized that I have to get good at it. So now I refer imperfect fits somewhere else. And here’s how to do it. I was once forced to fire a client who was in love with one of our coaches. And I don’t just mean like she was his biggest fan. I mean, she was in love with him. She was absolutely obsessed with him, and this made him uncomfortable. And of course his wife was uncomfortable, too. So the client just had to go, but I actually liked the client and I wanted the best for her.

Chris Cooper (11:14):
Even though I knew that I had to remove her from my gym fast, I dreaded that conversation. So I decided to find her a new home. I called around to other local gyms. I introduced myself and I asked about their programs. And finally I found one that I thought could really help her. So I said, “Hey, I’ve got this client. She’s amazing, but she’s not a great fit here. She has a credit for about $270 left at my gym. I’d like to transfer that to you and get her started right away.” And of course they were suspicious, right? Like what kind of monster was I dumping on their doorstep? So I told them, “Hey, if you don’t like her, you can just refund the balance. Okay?” And they agreed. And the client wasn’t exactly thrilled that I was referring her out, but it was better than being dumped by my gym completely.

Chris Cooper (12:02):
So she tried the other gym. She liked it. She lost 70 pounds there over the next two years. And she became their biggest fan. So the last service that I could actually provide for that client was to give her a way to continue her path to fitness. But the experience opened my eyes to the value of a referral partner. I was no longer afraid to say “you’re not a great fit for our program” because I didn’t have to hurt anyone’s feelings anymore. That meant that I could work only with clients who were a perfect match for my coaches and my gym. So here’s how to find a referral partner in your town. First, make a list of all the coaching businesses, not the big 24/7, all-hours-access, $9-a-month, partners. People who are actually coaches like you. Then pick the five gyms that can take care of your poor fits. The best five.

Chris Cooper (12:56):
There might be fewer. You’re not looking for technical expertise because nobody measures up to you, right? You’re looking for somebody who can demonstrate care. In other words, you’re viewing the person through the eyes of a potential client. Also, you’re not looking for somebody who is obviously second best. You don’t want the client to feel like they’re being sent to, you know, the poorer cousin down the road, or you don’t want them to regret the move or else they’re always gonna want to come back and you won’t be solving the problem. So now that you’ve made a list of three to five gyms, visit their websites and call two or three of them. Ask if you can drop by with coffee, and drop by with coffee and tell them that you wanna refer the clients who aren’t a good fit to your gym. Ask them if they would welcome those clients.

Chris Cooper (13:40):
And that’s it. Do not try to set up a cross-referral system with fees or affiliate deals or any other kind of deal. This should be a win for the client and the other gym, period. Your win here is not monetary. It’s really hard to remove clients who aren’t a good fit because none of us likes hurting a client’s feelings. And none of us likes losing revenue. So we keep them around. We read their private texts that come in at 1 a.m. with dread and we keep a suspicious eye on them when they’re around. In theory, firing a client is really easy, but in practice firing a client is really hard. So I used to try and keep every client or take every person who wanted to join my gym. And even when I didn’t need the money anymore, I just didn’t wanna hurt their feelings.

Chris Cooper (14:29):
But then I learned the value of a referral partner and my life got 300% easier. And then one day my referral partner sent somebody to my gym. And that was a bonus. The real win is working with my seed clients only and surrounding myself with the people who I can serve because they’re ready to be served at my level. I’ve got a video, if you click through the link in this podcast in the show notes, that will tell you how to identify your seed clients and your weed clients. But hopefully this podcast tells you exactly what to do about it. You don’t have to get everybody. Removing people who aren’t a great fit creates a space for somebody who is. And I promise you, after 20 years of gym ownership, taking out a client who’s maybe a C will always create a space for a client who’s an A to commit to you. It works time and time again. When your client’s at your gym see that they’re surrounded by only the best people, they’ll want to bring the best people in their life into your practice, too. My name’s Chris Cooper, I’ve got 20 years of experience in the fitness industry. I hope this helps.

Announcer: (15:45):
Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Please hit subscribe right now before this final message from Chris.

Chris Cooper (15:51):
We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now, it has more than 5,900 members, and it’s growing daily as gym owners join us for tips, tactics and community support. If you aren’t in that group, what are you waiting for? Get in there today so we can network and grow your business. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or gymownersunited.com. Join today.

The post Not Every Client Is a Good Fit for Your Business appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Your Next Client Is Stressed and Terrified Right Now

COVID changed the fitness industry in 2020, and fitness pros are still trying to figure out the new rules of the game.

As more and more data comes out, we’ll continue to learn how we can adjust our businesses to serve clients better.

Read on for my key takeaways from Mindbody’s “2022 Wellness Index Fitness Report.”

Mindbody’s report is based on a survey of 16,000 Americans who live in big U.S. cities. You can get the 39-page PDF here.

One of the report’s overarching themes is an echo of the all-too-common news stories that fill the health sections of every publication: People are stressed. The pandemic and its restrictions were hard on everyone, and we’re starting to learn exactly how challenging the last two years have been.

For example, about half of survey respondents said the pandemic had negative effects on their mental health. Gen Z (18-24) and Millennials (25-40) suffered most, at 57 and 53 percent, respectively.

Here’s a bombshell: 40 percent of respondents believe the pandemic has negatively affected their physical health.

And get this: The report states that 77 percent of consumers know physical activity improves their mental health. In fact, stress relief is now the No. 1 reason people work out. Before the pandemic, the top three reasons to hit the gym were:

1. Control weight—35 percent
2. Feel good—33 percent
3. Live a long and healthy life—32 percent

Here are the Top 3 from the Mindbody report for 2022 (you’ll note that the first two are basically the exact same thing):

1. Reduce stress—43 percent
2. Feel better mentally—43 percent
3. Look better physically—39 percent

Here’s a solid line from the report’s Takeaways section: “Rather than messages that focus on ‘getting in shape’ or ‘losing weight,’ leading with the mental health benefits of exercise may resonate more.”

You’ll have to analyze your own audience, but the info above might make you question the wisdom of posting yet another video on squat technique. You might be better off posting a testimonial from a member who says, “I can’t believe how much better I feel mentally after an hour at this gym.”

Why People Don’t Call You

The report also digs into the reasons people don’t use fitness to improve their lives. Here are the top barriers:

1. Too expensive
2. Worry about COVID-19 cleanliness
3. Don’t have time
4. Feel too intimidated

I’d suggest you ignore the first one. Your rates should be set to support your business and your life. People will pay them if you find the right people. And No. 2? All you can do is keep cleaning your space and telling people about it as COVID fears subside.

No. 3? We all know people can find time for anything they want to do. To address it, you might highlight the time-saving features of your business. Perhaps you have a 30-minute class or a “mommy and me” program that doubles down on adult fitness and child care. Maybe you have an at-home programming stream or provide online coaching that eliminates travel time. If your business can help people get fit fast, tell the world.

No. 4 is big deal—and it’s fixable.

Check this out: According to the report, more people feel too intimidated to go to a gym in 2022. This year, 19 percent of survey respondents said so, and that’s well up from 12 percent in 2021.

And here are the responses to the question “what would make you less intimidated in going to a studio/gym?”:

Getting in better shape first—55 percentSeeing more people like me in the gym/studio and its promotionsSeeing that the gym/studio supports diverse populations

You can–and should—address this stuff. Here are just a few ideas:

Put out a series of articles and videos that detail the exact fitness level required to join your gym. Define it even though the only qualification is likely “breathing.” Tell people that you serve beginners, and smile when you say it.
Focus on the welcoming aspects of your facility: your staff people, your intake process, your friendly members, and so on. Don’t post about your turf and reverse-hyper machine. Post about how you help new people feel comfortable.
Post pics that show beginners having fun. Not beastly athletes hitting PRs. Feature average people from all cultures and walks of life. Make sure your ideal prospective clients look at your media and see “people like me.”

Mindbody’s report highlighted once again a disconnect that has always existed: People know fitness improves health, but they’re so intimidated by gyms that they won’t start working out.  

I’ll provide a simple action plan to help you address the issue.

Every day, put up a post that does one of these three things:

1. Presents the mental-health benefits of fitness or details your mindset coaching services.

2. Makes your intake process and facility look professional and extremely welcoming. Tell people you’ll hold their hands.

3. Shows very average people doing basic fitness activities with smiles on their faces.

Remember this: People are out of shape and stressed, and you have the exact skills that can help them feel better.

You just need to explain that to them and address their fears. Do it every day. And do it as many times as it takes.

The post Your Next Client Is Stressed and Terrified Right Now appeared first on Two-Brain Business.