Chris Cooper's Blog, page 87

Where to Find Your Next Coach

By Jeff Jucha, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor

Think about Affinity Marketing: Your next client likely knows you or one of your current clients. Similarly, your next staff member likely knows you or someone on your team.

When looking for staff, imagine a dartboard: We’ll start at the bull’s-eye. That’s the area where people have the most affinity for you, your business and your existing team. As you move outward from the center, audiences have less affinity. 

For example, a person who’s never even heard of you would be at the very edge of the dartboard. Most business owners often start looking for staff there through ads on job sites. But what if you started looking closer to the center?

When looking for a coach, look at your closest connections first, then move outward. Here’s the order:

Your seed clients, then all your clients.Your current coaches.Your contacts.The internet.
1. Clients

Start with personality and train for skill. You like your seed clients—your very best clients—and you want more of them.

We tell gym owners to run an annual “advanced theory course” to identify potential coaches from among their best clients. But your best clients probably also know other trainers in town. So ask them, “Have you trained with another coach you really liked?”

After speaking to seed clients, approach other clients or post in your members group and ask them the same question.

2. Coaches

Next, ask your team members if they can think of anyone they would love to work with. Who do they know who would be a great fit in the business? You’ll want a name and method to contact the recommended people. If your current coach feels more comfortable setting up an introduction, let them start the conversation for you.

3. Contacts

Pull up your contacts list or friends list on Facebook. Ask, “Who has impressed me in the past and could be a great fit here?” Those are the next phone calls to make. Don’t promise employment; just let them know you have some opportunities coming up and they came to mind. Ask if they’re interested. 

At this point, you’ve gone through three audiences to grow your pool of potential hires. Next comes the stage where most people actually start their search for staff.

4. The Internet

There are multiple services for connecting employers and employees: Indeed.com, Barbelljobs.com, etc. You can definitely use these services. Just don’t forget your local audience.

You can make an online application using Google Forms and post a link to it on Facebook and Instagram with a short description of what you’re looking for. Ask your staff and clients to share it. If you’re a client of Kilo (Gym Lead Machine), there’s already a done-for-you job-posting funnel you can use. If want more views on your post, consider boosting it for your local area and set the interest field to your type of business service, like “CrossFit” or “martial arts.”

Start in the Center

To find the best staff members, move outward through each audience. When you find a potential fit, you don’t have to stop there. You can keep building your pool of applicants if you want a more diverse group to select from—now or later. You should always be in “hiring mode.”

After you’ve broadened your pool of applicants, you can start interviewing your potential hires to find the next great fit for your gym.

The post Where to Find Your Next Coach appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Where to Find Gym Staff During a Labor Shortage

Chris Cooper (00:02):

The job market is nuts. Where do you find more coaches? I’m Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. I’ve been through this a few times in my 22 years as a gym owner. And today I’m gonna share with you our step-by-step strategy for finding more coaches for your gym and getting some help. If this episode is helpful, please just take one minute, less than a minute, to go on your podcast platform and hit subscribe. We use that as a flag to tell us which episodes help you the most. And we’ve been producing free content every day for 10 years. Now, I wanna make sure that we’re producing the best possible stuff. So please just hit pause, go hit subscribe and let us know with your listening vote what you want to hear more of. So we’re in a classic pickle that happens every few years, and that is it becomes hard to find coaches today.

Chris Cooper (00:52):

I’m gonna tell you four steps to getting more coaches that might open your eyes to some new opportunities. But before we do that, there’s kind of like a step zero here. Most of us who are really good practitioners and very passionate about what we do in our business think that we need to replace ourselves. We think that, “Okay, my business is growing. I’m getting more clients. I’m running outta time. I can’t do all this stuff. I need to hire a new coach.” Before you hire a new coach, replace yourself in all of the other roles first, especially the non-client-facing ones. So if you’re exhausted because you’re coaching all day and then mopping the floor at night, hire a cleaner first. This will cost you less money, very little training time, and it will free up like an hour of your time. We teach this as a strategy called the Value Ladder in Two-Brain.

Chris Cooper (01:44):

And basically what you wanna do is replace yourself in all non-client-facing roles first. So you hire your cleaner, you hire your admin. Then you replace yourself in client-facing roles that are less valuable or less hard to acquire than a coach. So you might hire a CSM. Then you replace yourself in some coaching roles that are easier to replace yourself in. Like a group-coaching role is easier to replace yourself in than a personal-training role. Then you replace yourself as a personal trainer. So before you dig into finding a new coach, start working up the Value Ladder. Like, what else are you doing with your time where you could be replacing yourself either with, you know, somebody who’s paid less, maybe a virtual assistant, or somebody in your gym? Who’s good at that one particular task? The CSM role is a great example.

Chris Cooper (02:34):

Very leverageable. This will improve your length of engagement. This is the person that calls your members; keeps them engaged; says “where you been?” and “happy birthday” and “hey, your credit card failed.” It’s about a five-hour-a-week role. It’s usually less than $20 an hour. It’s critical work that will pay for itself many times over that you’re probably not doing because you don’t have time. The goal here is not just to create jobs for more people. The goal here is to keep you focused on the work that brings you the highest value. Now, when you’ve replaced yourself in those roles and it’s time to actually hire a coach, there are four places we look. The first place is within our own clients. This might sound easy and obvious, but here’s how we do it. Every year we run something called the “advanced theory course.” It’s free to our clients.

Chris Cooper (03:23):

We usually take about five of them. And our goal is to show them what life is like on the other side of the clipboard. It’s to show them what programming means, how we get our programming, what it’s like to stand up in front of people and coach. We do a little bit of public speaking. We give them a book to read and do a little report on. And what we’re hoping to do is just build brand affinity. We want them to say “wow, there’s a lot that goes into coaching” and appreciate the service more. But as a bonus, I’m also looking for my next coaches. So we make it clear to them this is not the pathway to a job necessarily. It’s not like a course that you can take if you wanna be a coach. Instead, what will happen is at the end of it, if we get somebody who can show up on time, who gets really excited when they’re talking about it, who can speak in front of other people and project energy, even if they’re not like super great at coaching the thruster or whatever, I say, “I’ve got the raw material.” Then I’ll approach them and say, “Hey, have you ever thought about actually coaching people?” And from there I can put them through the rest of our training courses. I can sign them up for The Refined Art of Coaching courses. I can sign them up for their CrossFit Level 1 or their first level yoga instructor course or whatever my method is. I can go get them certified in that method. If I want them to start as a personal trainer, I can get them certified to be a personal trainer, start them one on one, and then teach them how to coach one to many.

Chris Cooper (04:55):

That’s Step 1. Step 2: What if I don’t have any clients who I think would be a good coach? And again, the qualifier for a good coach here is just personality. You hire for personality and you train for skill. Don’t ask yourself “who is the best mover? Who is the best demonstrator? Who is my top athlete?” That’s the wrong way to approach this. You should be asking yourself, “Who is the happiest, smiliest person in my gym? Who is the one who knows everybody else’s name and greets them at the start of class. Who is the first person to high-five everybody after the workout?” You can train them for everything else they need to know, but you can’t train personality. Okay. So Step 1: hire from within. Step 2 is find another trainer who’s working nearby who wants a better opportunity. So, for example, let’s say that you’ve got a personal-training client.

Chris Cooper (05:47):

And for the last three years, she did personal training with another trainer, but she moved. Now she’s closer to your gym. You can ask your best clients “have you ever worked with another trainer that you really liked?” And then you can go out to that trainer and say, “Hey, look, I think your talents are maybe being wasted at this globo gym. Or maybe they’re not providing you the opportunity that you deserve. I think I can do better.” And then you can start a conversation with them. If your clients have never trained with anybody else that they liked, have never heard a good thing from their friends about anybody else that they liked, here’s what you can do. You can go to a globo gym and you can say, “Who is your top trainer?” And then you can buy a session with that trainer and see if you like them.

Chris Cooper (06:30):

And if you do at the end of the session, then you can approach them about maybe giving them a better opportunity. And it should only take one session to know, like, do they have a sparkling professional, energetic way about them? If they do, don’t worry if they’ve never done CrossFit or strength and conditioning before. Again, you hire for personality and you train for skill. You’re not poaching this person from the globo gym. I promise you the globo gym has other trainers. I promise you that this coach is not getting the opportunity at that globo gym that you can give them by teaching them entrepreneurialism. Okay. So what you’re actually doing is you’re ascending somebody who’s passionate about fitness, who wants to make it their career but will probably phase out of the industry in less than two years—because that’s like the globo gym average.

Chris Cooper (07:21):

Okay. So Step 2 is recruit the best in town. Step 3: If that doesn’t work, find the future best at a university or a college with a fitness program, a kin program, a kinesiology program, a chiropractic intro program, even a health program or a teacher program. You go to that college and you say, “Hey, it’s Chris from Catalyst Gym here. I always love talking to graduates of your program. Do you have anybody right now who’s like a real standout that I should be talking to?” And one of the best examples of this in my own gym was we were talking to a local community college. They had this fitness and health program and their instructor said, “Yeah, I’ve got a few, but honestly, I’m not really sure what you’re looking for. Why don’t we bring my entire class over to your gym? You can guide them through a workout, do whatever you want. And then, you know, just see who stands out to you. And we’ll just start a conversation between you and them?” Community colleges especially are amazing at this because a lot of them make their money by promoting placement. So they can advertise like “95 percent of our graduates are placed as soon as they’re done their diploma” or their degree or whatever. And so if they’ve got an employer or potential employer coming up to them, that’s a huge win. Like that’s one job less that they have to find in the future. So if you approach these colleges, you form a relationship. You say, “Hey, look, we’re looking at making opportunities available. We’d love to bring your students in.” That’s one last session the teacher has to teach. You can cherry-pick from there.

Chris Cooper (09:01):

Now you’re getting raw materials here, right? Like this is not a refined end product that you’re getting. But again, you’re just looking for personalities, and you can train for skill later. And we’ve had a number of local college grads come through the door at Catalyst and work for three to four years and then either go on to a higher-level program at university or just stay with us. Or, you know, sometimes they decide they’re gonna do a different career. Some have gone on to open their own gyms, too, which is awesome. It’s great. But whatever happens, like they could not have furthered their fitness career if we hadn’t found them, pulled them out of the masses and taught them what to do. So third option is find the future best candidate. The fourth option is to advertise. And in this case, we usually use a service like Indeed.

Chris Cooper (09:48):

And we give you example job descriptions and ad templates and everything in our Growth Phase of our mentorship program. You could just copy-paste. We know that they’ve worked. In these ads, what you basically wanna do is talk about the opportunity. You don’t wanna say “we’re looking for a personal trainer.” Instead, what you would wanna say is “we are looking for fitness professionals who want to grow a meaningful, high-earning career.” You don’t talk about the wages. You talk about the opportunity. You say “our coaches, on average, earn 20 percent more than coaches at other gyms” or “our personal trainers earn 50 percent more than the industry average.” Okay? Then you give them a very specific application requirement. If you don’t wanna see a resume, who cares? What you wanna see is video. Again, for the fourth time now, you’re measuring personality.

Chris Cooper (10:41):

You also wanna know “is this person going to be able to promote themselves a little bit as we’re trying to get them clients faster? Are they familiar with social media? Do they know how to build an audience?” And so you say something like, “Apply in a video lasting two minutes or less and talk about your passion for fitness and why you wanna work at this company. Send your video to blank.” If they can’t figure out how to record a video and send it to you, you’re gonna have a much slower time building up their clientele. Anyway, anybody under 25 should just automatically know how to do all this stuff. So the reason that you do this is you wanna see them. You wanna see their personality, but you wanna know that they can do content creation or media or whatever. Okay? So the four stages—I’ll start from stage zero. Hire lower-value roles than your coaches.

Chris Cooper (11:32):

First, fill that up while you’re trying to fill up your coaching roles. Your first tier: Hire from within. Hire for personality, train for skill. Second tier: find the best in town. Third tier: Find the future best. Fourth tier: Advertise. Look, if you’re in a high-turnover market, you’re in Manhattan, you’re eventually going to have to run ads. And just like you’re running ads for clients, you might have to run ads all the time for coaches, but in most places you don’t need a big coach-acquisition strategy. You won’t always be hiring. You should always have feelers out there. You should always be looking for more opportunities. If you have an entrepreneurial approach to hiring staff, hiring more staff is great because it grows the pie for everybody. But in most cases you don’t hire until you absolutely need someone. And that’s another reason why we start within. Before we go to ads, we wanna take the shortest path to the best possible staff, and then train that person to get better and better and better over time. Hope this helps. Those are the four stages that we teach. If you need specifics, like job descriptions, roles and tasks, templates, checklists, training guides, staff evaluations, contracts, we have all of that in our mentorship program. Hope it helps.

Mike Warkentin (12:48):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio, please subscribe for more episodes. Now, Coop’s back with a final message.

Chris Cooper (12:54):

We created the Gym Owner’s United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now, it has more than 5,600 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 Where to Find Gym Staff During a Labor Shortage appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Six-Week Challenges: What New Gym Owners Need to Know

“Do 30-day fitness challenges actually work?”

That was the headline of a recent Livescience.com article, which came complete with analysis and opinion from a kinesiology professor.

Author Jamie Kahn is likely trying to help consumers avoid getting tricked into thinking 30 days of work will solve all their health and fitness problems. And that’s great.

For new gym owners, the article highlights an enduring attitude they need to understand: Some people actually think that a one-and-done 30-day “fitness challenge” is enough to make dramatic changes.

That fact can be used for evil: think of fly-by-night gyms that actually just want the front-end revenue from a challenge participant. They’ll say anything to get that cash, and the challenger will get no end of empty promises designed to encourage them to sign up. Once they sign up, they’re given some pasty, ineffective program that keeps them semi-occupied for four weeks.

Then they hit Day 30, realize they’ve accomplished nothing and start looking for the next quick fix. The gym continues fishing for more short-term clients who will drop a few dollars and then vanish. The cycle is bad for the consumer and the fitness industry as a whole.

On the other hand, the “challenge mentality” can be used for good: Great gym owners use well-crafted ads to start conversations and relationships. Instead of promising the moon and delivering little, these entrepreneurs use a challenge as a lever to move a client toward a long-term fitness plan that’s actually going to provide the desired results.

Listen: “Is the Six-Week Challenge Dead?”

So yes, sometimes great gym owners will promote challenges, “six-week transformations” and similar programs to a market full of people who will bolt from ad copy that pushes “a comprehensive, detailed, two-year fitness, nutrition and lifestyle plan that requires hard work but provides monumental results.” You’ll lose most readers very early in that pitch.

But that longer program is actually what you’re selling as a reputable gym owner, and it’s actually what consumers need to change their lives. Our full coaching packages provide huge value and help people accomplish their goals. Getting them to realize that is the key, and you need to connect with them to make it happen.

So if you’re a newer gym owner who’s conflicted or confused when it comes to challenges and “transformations,” know this: When used properly, these programs can provide a way to connect with modern consumers to find out what they really want and need. They can be combined with the prescriptive model and outstanding onboarding and retention practices to create long-term clients—which should be the goal of every gym owner.

Just as a challenge isn’t the cure-all for every fitness problem, it isn’t the one and only answer to a gym owner’s growth problems. But it might be used tactically as a small part of a much larger strategy to create a strong business.  

So should you run a challenge? The answer depends on many factors: your staffing levels, your sales systems, your onboarding and retention systems, your marketing plan and budget, and so on. An experienced mentor can help you evaluate your business and make a decision.

Two-Brain mentors have an exact plan to help gym owners grow their businesses and help more clients find success. They can tell you how to attract members through sound marketing practices and retain them for years. If you’re a new gym owner and you’ve got questions on challenges or anything else, Two-Brain has answers.

To find out more about working with a mentor, book a free call.

The post Six-Week Challenges: What New Gym Owners Need to Know appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Exact Steps to Hiring and Training a Virtual Assistant

Chris Cooper: (00:02)
Have you ever thought about hiring a virtual assistant? Today, I’m gonna give you the seven steps to hiring and the five steps to onboarding a virtual assistant in your gym business. My name is Chris Cooper. And if this episode is helpful to you, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a five-star review. And if you really, really loved it, you can just always DM me on Facebook. There have been virtual assistants—VAs–around the fitness industry since they first started becoming popular in the mid-‘90s. And over the years, we’ve been approached by a bunch of different VA companies about promoting their service or partnering with Two-Brain, but we’ve never really felt super comfortable doing that. And there’s always been a variety of reasons. Sometimes the VA company wants you to just commit to paying $500 or a thousand dollars a month, renting the VA’s time and then telling them what to do every week.

Chris Cooper: (00:59)
The problem with that is you’ve just got another staff person to micromanage who’s less efficient than your current staff. And you have to tell them everything in explicit detail. In other cases, VA companies will push the gym owner to do something they don’t really need to do because that’s what their VA specializes in. So, for example: “Hey, we’ve got a great VA who’s amazing at TikTok. You should do TikTok.” And so the gym owner says, “Okay, well, I can outsource this.” But you still run into the same problems. And there are other examples, too, of people overpaying for something that they could actually get done locally if they wrote out a job description. And finally, a lot of VAs require a lot of micromanaging. So today I’m gonna go through a couple of different processes with you and provide some step-by-step instructions from our friends at Assistantly.

Chris Cooper: (01:48)
We formed a partnership with Assistantly earlier this year, and I’ll walk you through the process of how all of that works, but it took us probably two years of looking before we finally made this deal. And we’ve tested out these VAs. We have two very specific job roles for them, and I’ll illustrate how that works as we go. So the first step is our no-BS guide for hiring your first VA. And there are seven steps that I wanna walk through with you. Step 1: make a list of everything that you do in your business and organize them into categories like administration, operations, sales, marketing, social media. In the Two-Brain Business RampUp program, you’re going to work through an exercise called “roles and tasks” where you determine exactly all the different hats that you wear in your business and how you do the things when you’re wearing those hats.

Chris Cooper: (02:41)
Before you can delegate anything to a staff person, to a VA, to anyone, even to software, you need to determine exactly what you want done step by step and how you want it done. If not, you hand this off to somebody who isn’t properly trained and you micromanage them, or you hire a VA to do it and you micromanage them, or you look at software to solve your problem and you have to micromanage it. Okay? So the first step is get everything out of your head and onto paper. Determine your roles and tasks. The second thing is you need to determine the value, the replacement value of each one of these roles. So, for example, you wanna replace the roles that are cheapest to hire for first. So cleaner is a great example. You hire a cleaner first. You pay the cleaner for three hours a week.

Chris Cooper: (03:37)
You reinvest your time during those three hours into a higher value skill. VAs can fill some of these lower value roles for you. Absolutely. They’re not gonna fill your high-value roles like coaching. They’re not gonna fill your lowest value roles like cleaning, admin roles, CSM roles, social media. They’re perfect for that. Okay. So now that you’ve got this list and you’ve got what we call the Value Ladder, which is a breakdown of how much it would cost to replace you in each role, you’re ready to go out and hire a VA for the work that you want done. Next, Step 3: you wanna look for somebody that can help you with each section of the business for the stuff that takes you too long, like, you know, pulling your metrics out of Zen Planner or whatever. And the stuff that you hate.

Chris Cooper: (04:24)
Okay. So start with the lowest value rules, then the roles that you hate, and then the stuff that requires way too much of your time. Fourth, make a list of the type of traits and qualities that you’d like in a virtual assistant. And you’re gonna do this by role, too. So our example is client success manager. We broke down the client success manager role. We published that role in the Two-Brain Business RampUp program so you can just download our job description. We published what that role should be paid. So this is, in general, about an $18 an hour or less role. Then we said, “What kind of qualities does this person need?” They have to be bright and sunny from the time they wake up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night. They have to be looking for opportunities to celebrate success.

Chris Cooper: (05:10)
They have to be good at conversation. They have to be very right brained. They think of people’s anniversaries. They see when somebody’s struggling, and they take action on that. Because I am not that person, right? I’m a left-brained, I-wanna-see-a spreadsheet kind of guy. Okay. Step 5 is you take this list of roles and tasks, and you take these character traits to a VA company. And you say, “Who is the best match here?” Now again, the biggest mistake that people do when they’re hiring VAs is they think, “Oh, great. Low-budget talent. I’m gonna hire them. And then I’ll just find enough stuff for them to do. I have so many things that keep me busy. I can just hand them off.” But they don’t start with a job description or a list of roles and tasks or a playbook before they hire this person.

Chris Cooper: (05:57)
And then they wind up with somebody else to babysit and supervise all the time. So you take that list of roles and tasks to a company. Then you say, “Here are the character attributes that I want,” and you let them find the VA for you. Okay? Step 6: You interview the people. You interview some options. It shouldn’t just be like, “Oh, here’s this one person that matches your list perfectly. You’re hiring them.” The VA company should still be able to give you some options based on skill sets and personality types. But Step 6 is you need to spend a week onboarding them. So hiring a VA is a lot like hiring somebody local. You have to train them in the job that you want them to do. Having your playbook is a huge, necessary, critical step of that, but it’s not the only step.

Chris Cooper: (06:44)
Okay. And then finally, Step 7 is to treat the VA like an extension of your team and watch your time start freeing up. So if you’re having a local staff meeting, I would invite your VA. If you’re celebrating your team’s birthdays with a card and a gift, I would do that with your VA. They are a human. They’re not a robot from a different country. You need to treat them as part of your team. But that also means that they’re subject to evaluation, they’re subject to upgrades, and they have to meet the same standard as somebody else local. Remember, paying somebody less does not mean that you’re just looking for cheap offshore labor. What it means is that you’re providing an opportunity to somebody usually in another country who might not be able to make the income that they could make working for you.

Chris Cooper: (07:32)
So even though they earn less than somebody else locally does, they should still provide more value than you would get from hiring somebody local instead of just like the discount labor option. And they should be accountable to the same standard as somebody else. You’re not just buying a service that’s two-thirds as good for half the price. Okay. That’s really critical. So here’s how we did this with Assistantly. We broke down two job descriptions where we think a remote, well-trained professional might potentially do as good a job or better as somebody who’s local to you. The two job descriptions that we worked with Assistantly on are client success manager, because that person doesn’t have to be in your gym to be successful, and social media manager, because, try as they might, a lot of gym owners just struggle to create content. I’ve been telling gym owners for well over a decade they need to create and publish content consistently.

Chris Cooper: (08:29)
They just can’t do it. It has to be done. And so instead of investing their time in this, they can choose to invest their money and just have somebody else do it. So there’s these two roles. We broke down exactly what each role does. To the CSM, we actually added lead nurture. Then we said, “Here is exactly how you do lead nurture.” So we gave Assistantly our sell-by-chat matrix. We gave them videos from our partners like Wodify and Kilo on how to use their software. When they’re doing lead nurture, we added metrics pulling to the CSM job description. And then we said the CSM jobs should be possible to do in under 20 hours per week. And so we built a price for that. It’s a special price for Two-Brain gyms. If you’re listening to this and you wanna hire a CSM through Assistantly that’s trained in Two-Brain processes, trained in a lot of different software packages and trained in lead nurture, you can just go to the Marketplace on our app and click the Assistantly logo.

Chris Cooper: (09:27).

If you’re not in Two-Brain, unfortunately this partnership is not available to you, but there’s still a lot of lessons that you can learn here as you go out and seek VAs on your own. Okay? So the next thing is, after you’ve hired the VA, how do you onboard them? And there are about five instructions here. Five steps that you should take. So the first step is set up permissions. So you need to set up a business email for your VA. You can own this email address, but you wanna have a place for them to come where they can consistently get information from you. Okay? The second is you need to add the VA to every channel or tool that they need to be part of. So for example, if you communicate to your staff with Slack, your VA needs to be in Slack.

Chris Cooper: (10:15)
If you use Kilo, you need to get them set up on Kilo. If you’re using Wodify or Zen Planner or something else, you need to get them access to that. You need to give them your login to the Two-Brain app so that they can take your metrics out of Zen Planner every month and put them in the app for you. Right? That’s a great example of a task that is simple to do, but it takes you way too much time every month, right? That’s something that you could teach a VA to do. The next step is you need to take time to introduce them to your business. And you introducing them means that you have a relationship with them. If you hire them the first day and then just never talk to them again, it’s like hiring a new staff person locally and then sticking them in the closet, having no conversation with them and expecting them to do well.

Chris Cooper: (10:58)
It’s just not going to work. Okay. Step 3—and you can’t skip this step—is they need to know your business goals and your business culture. Business goals are critically important. So I’ll tell you one way when we were doing our tests that we screwed this up: We hired a CSM and we said, “Okay, you’re gonna be doing lead nurture.” And we didn’t say “the goal of lead nurture is to get people to book a No Sweat Intro.” Right? My brain just skipped that step and I assumed they would know. So what would happen is people would get into our lead-nurture funnel and they’d start texting back and forth with the VA. They’d fill out a form on our website. They would enter our CRM, which is Kilo as a lead, and then our CSM would take over and they’d start nurturing this lead.

Chris Cooper: (11:51)
But when I looked back at his texts, it was like, “Here are our prices, right?” We don’t do that. It’s, “Hey, do you wanna sign up for personal training or a group?” We don’t do that. We do a No Sweat Intro. And so it’s very important that you tell them your only goal is to get this client to book a No Sweat Intro. Okay. Or if the CSM is working with an existing client, your only goal is to get them to book a Goal Review. Your only goal is to follow this client journey and reach out at each one of these touchpoints. You need to tell them exactly what the goal is. Not just exactly what to do. Okay. It’s also important that they know your background, your vision and your values and your goals and your policies, because when they’re talking to future clients, they need that context to understand what they should say. And being good at English is not enough.

Chris Cooper: (12:39)
You’re good at English. I’m good at English, but if they don’t have that context of what you’re trying to do, how you’re trying to help people, they won’t know what to say. And the conversation is going to feel really, really awkward. Okay? They need to know your company structure. Who is everyone, and what do they do? They need to know how you will measure success in their role. So for example, a great KPI to give somebody doing lead nurture is calls booked and calls showed. So your goal is to book No Sweat Intros. We will declare your role a success if we’re booking five No Sweat Intros a month. My job is to get you at least 15 leads per month to work with. And out of those five, at least four have to actually show up. So you’re tracking them on set rate and show rate.

Chris Cooper: (13:27)
It’s not their job to sell the client. That’s whoever is doing your NSIs. You have to give them KPIs on the things that they can control and measure their success. Okay. And then finally you need to review their key responsibilities with them. So just like you would do with a regular local person that you hire, you have to say, “You have 20 hours a week. If there’s 25 hours of work ahead of you this week, here is how you prioritize. You do these things first.” And I’ve actually screwed this up. It took us a long time to kind of perfect this system with VAs. And one of the hard lessons that I learned was that their priorities might not be my priorities. And so if I say, “Okay, I want you to spend time doing this. I want you to spend time editing the video, producing the podcast, creating the graphics and posting,” they will prioritize, you know, the graphics maybe when I prioritize posting. So if they ran out of time, they just didn’t post to Instagram, where I would say “post something even if it’s not perfect instead of trying to make everything perfect and not posting.” Okay. So when you’re onboarding, just one more tip is include video and screenshots. So it takes a long time to type out your processes and procedures and put them in a playbook. You should do that. Absolutely. But this VA, whether they’re a native English speaker or not, can probably benefit more from a quick video walkthrough. So, for example, when we’re training our CSM role through Two-Brain and Assistantly partnership, we give them videos showing them “here’s how you use Kilo. Here’s how you use Wodify.” And so now they know where to go to track leads through the pipeline, to move people to booked in an NSI or whatever, to pull metrics out, right.

Chris Cooper: (15:18)
They can watch that video over and over again and just do it side by side. And then we give them a video of how to use the Two-Brain App and the Two-Brain Dashboard, too. So if you’ve never done this before, you can use Loom, you can use Zoom, whatever you want to, but give them actual video instructions, walking them through it step by step, instead of just getting on a call and telling them or getting on a phone call and telling them. Like, give them a recording. All right. So Step 5 is this: set clear expectations. You need to give them feedback there. No VA, no assistant, no staff person is ever going to be perfect right outta the box. You need to help them refine themselves as you go. You need to set deadlines and expectations around them. What happens if a deadline gets missed? You need to set up some quality-control process.

Chris Cooper: (16:07)
You do not want to micromanage your VA and keep looking over their shoulder 24/7, but you need to do have a process with check-ins that are more frequent at first. So what we did is we said “you should send us an email every day at the beginning and the end of the day saying, ‘Here’s what I plan to do today. And here’s what I accomplished.’” After things are going really well, you can move that maybe to weekly, and then eventually, maybe even to monthly. The same way, you wanna also set up expectations around when they should work. Some VAs will think, “Okay I’m gonna work from 9 until 12, my time every day.” But that’s not really when leads come in, right? You want to set them up to work when they are going to be most needed. And you should do that in fractional time.

Chris Cooper: (16:51)
If you can, too, tell them how performance is gonna be managed. Give them a list of priorities. Like “take this first. No matter what happens you do this first.” These are the keys. And again, it’s really like, you need to get any role or job out of your head and onto paper before you hire anybody. Not just a VA. Also, when you’re looking at VAs, you shouldn’t just look at “how can I get the same labor for a cheaper price or what am I willing to sacrifice to pay less for this role?” What you need to do is say, “How can I hire somebody who can do this better than I can or fill a gap that isn’t getting done in my business? And then what should I expect to pay?” In some cases you should pay a virtual assistant what you would pay somebody who’s working in your town, or even more, because you’re still getting value.

Chris Cooper: (17:43)
If they’re providing a higher value service than you can do yourself, or they’re better at it than somebody in your town, then outsource your VA. Hiring a VA is not all about saving money. It’s about acquiring value. You can invest your time and stuff, or you can invest your money and stuff. If all you’re looking for is “how can I get somebody to do admin for five or six bucks an hour?” then by all means, go on Fiver, but you’re not gonna get high-quality labor. Instead, what you need to do when you’re thinking about a VA is approaching this from a value perspective and saying, “What is the best ROI that I can actually get from hiring a virtual assistant? Can I get a better ROI from hiring locally? And if I am gonna go the virtual assistant route, how do I maximize my ROI either by getting very high quality or by getting the same quality at a slightly lower rate?” You never say, “What’s the cheapest I can hire somebody for?” because it’s gonna be more work than just doing it yourself.

Chris Cooper: (18:42)
Okay. So start with the Value Ladder. Do your roles and tasks. Do your playbook onboard properly. Train them in the systems. We’ve done a lot of this for you at Two-Brain. If you’re a Two-Brain client, go to our Marketplace and check out the partnership with Assistantly. I hope this helps you. I really, really think that if you’re running an owner-operator business like a gym, you can probably outsource a lot more than you currently are doing. A lot of roles don’t require local participation or local attendance to work. CSM is one of those roles. Social media manager is another, but do your homework and be prepared to actually bring a real staff member on. Hope this helps. If it does, please leave us a five-star review wherever you’re listening to this podcast and send me a DM to request more.

Mike Warkentin: (19:33)
That was Chris Cooper on Two-Brain Radio. Thanks for listening. Before you go hit subscribe. So you don’t miss a show. Now Coop’s back to close it out.

Chris Cooper: (19:41)
We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now, it has more than 5,600 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 at Gym Owners United on Facebook or gymownersunited.com. Join today.

The post The Exact Steps to Hiring and Training a Virtual Assistant appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Mentoring for 9Round and Other Fitness Franchise Owners

Chris Cooper (00:02):

Hey, guys, we got a great question this week. And that was “how is it possible that Two-Brain works with 9Round gyms and CrossFit gyms and Fit Body Boot Camp gyms. Today, I’m gonna tell you how that is possible and how we do it. And if this is valuable to you, please hit subscribe or leave a comment below and let me know what kind of gym you own and whether you want help. So we work with 9Round gyms. We work with different franchisees. We work with CrossFit gyms. And this question came up because we published our recent leaderboard for revenue. So every month we track metrics in all the gyms in Two-Brain. We find out who the top 10 are in each category. And then we say, “What are you doing?” And for the first time, a couple of franchises appeared on the leaderboard.

Chris Cooper (00:48):

And so people were saying, “How is this possible?” I was also on a call with CrossFit’s interim CEO, Alison Andreozzi, and she asked, “What model do you teach?” What we do at Two-Brain is not so much a model as it is starting from first principles and then tailoring exactly these principles to your specific business. And so we do work with different fitness franchises. We work with martial-arts gyms. We have ninja-warrior gyms. We have women-specific gyms, 9Round that I mentioned earlier, boot camps and CrossFit gyms. And we can do that because we start with the principles that I’m gonna get into right now. So the first thing that we do is we look at the business itself and we say, “Let’s systemize everything. Let’s get everything out of the owner’s head so that they don’t have to waste time micromanaging everything and trying to control everything—and then they’ll have time to work on growth.”

Chris Cooper (01:42):

So we start by writing playbooks, SOPs, client journeys—all the standardization tools that you might think that you would get from a franchise, but you usually don’t. And I’m not saying this is true in the case of any specific franchise, but even with other franchises that I’ve worked with outside the fitness industry, like ServiceMaster or, you know, tire stores, you don’t get a step-by-step playbook that will tell the staff how to replace the owner in daily activities. And so one of the first things that we do with every gym is start by creating this playbook. And there’s a step-by-step process to this. We can give you a template, and then you just customize it for your specific gym. So we start with that. Then we start with metrics.

Chris Cooper (02:30):

Now there are six common metrics that will tell us how your gym is doing no matter what kind of gym you own. If it’s a Pilates studio, yoga studio, Fit Body Boot Camp, F45, Orangetheory—it doesn’t matter. We wanna know how many clients you have, what’s your average revenue per member, how long your clients are staying, the return on investment that you’re getting, your effective hourly rate as an owner (what your time is worth?), and how much you’re paying yourself. There are other metrics that we might use with different gyms, and we’re also gonna track marketing metrics. And these will be common to any type of gym, no matter what you own. So I wanna know how many leads you’re getting. How many of those leads are actually booking an appointment? How many of those appointments are showing up?

Chris Cooper (03:15):

And how many of the people who show up are actually closing? Now, the way that you do your closing meeting might differ. If you’re a CrossFit gym or a personal-training gym or a strength and conditioning facility, the questions that you answer might be different. You might even do a trial option instead of sitting down for a No Sweat Intro. But no matter what kind of gym you own, we can optimize that process. And that’s what comes next. So the next stage is what we call “optimization,” and that is looking for opportunities to improve the systems that you have right now. So, for example, a jiu-jitsu gym: They might find that they can onboard people more effectively one on one instead of just throwing them on the mat. CrossFit gyms can onboard people more effectively and keep them longer if they have a solid on-ramp program.

Chris Cooper (04:06):

So we have a system for that. 9Round gyms can onboard people and improve their retention with some one-on-one sessions. And so we see that opportunity. Many gyms could do better by offering a nutrition component to help their clients get better results. And every gym can benefit from having a referral system, for example. And so while the actual application of these principles might be different in a boxing gym and a CrossFit gym, the general principle is the same. And so we can work with lots of gyms because we’re a one-on-one mentorship practice and tailor these approaches to the gym, no matter what you’re doing. And so any gym can benefit from this program. So optimization might mean adding things like personal-training options or nutrition, but it might also mean adding a referral program to improve your marketing. It might mean training the owner and their staff on how to coach people to buy or creating a sales process.

Chris Cooper (05:04):

It might mean boosting your ARM or looking for opportunities to serve your clients by offering them supplements or other services. And it might be ways just to improve your retention—like, you know, having an onboarding process, having your client journey mapped out, doing frequent Goal Review Sessions, upgrading client packages, et cetera. So we can optimize. The next step is growing the business. So this is really where we learn marketing, and we set up four different funnels for every gym, no matter whether you’re in a franchise or you’re a solo entrepreneur, no matter whether you’re in a big city or you’re completely remote. You know, you’re in like a remote Italian village—we have gyms there, too. We’re gonna teach you four different funnels. The first is referral. The second is an organic, like a free unpaid online funnel. The third is a media funnel and the fourth is a paid advertising strategy.

Chris Cooper (05:57):

And different funnels will work differently depending on where you are and what type of business you have. What you put in those funnels will be different depending what type of business you have. But we have resources for that. And the way that we tailor those resources is through one-on-one mentorship. So while the principle of having four different marketing funnels is the same for every gym. What goes in those funnels and what strategy goes in there is very different gym by gym. And it could even be different for two franchisees. Working in the same system, different owners have different strengths and different weaknesses. They have different amounts of time and priorities. Some owners are great at referrals and talking to their clients about it, and that’s their marketing, and that’s all they need. Other owners, they might prefer to do paid ads, and they need to get good at that.

Chris Cooper (06:45):

But we’re a one-on-one mentorship practice because our mentors can tailor your method and your path to success based on what you’re good at and what your preferences are. And then after you’ve grown the business and you’re making a good income, you can look at the next phase, which is “scale.” And we have a program for this, too. This is really where you’re going from one gym to many gyms. Maybe you’re buying more franchises, trying to take over a territory. Maybe you’re buying out a local gym that’s struggling. Maybe you’re building a new gym from scratch, or maybe you’re reinvesting into other businesses or other investments. This is the Tinker Phase. I really won’t get into that, but we do have even some franchisees doing that right now, buying up bigger territories like down in Austin, Texas, for example. So that’s the way that we’re able to work with all gym franchises, like 9Round, Fit Body Boot Camp, franchises that are heart-rate specific like Orangetheory, or gyms that are independent but license a brand like CrossFit, or gyms that are full-on independent “solo-preneurs.”

Chris Cooper (07:53):

I run my own brand. I’m a strength and conditioning program. We can work with all of them because we start with general principles. And then we tailor our specific tactics through one-on-one mentorship. Our templates can be tailored for everybody. Our mentorship makes all the material and all the principles and all the knowledge and the wealth of curriculum that we have in Two-Brain applicable to your gym. But we don’t force a specific model on anyone. And so sometimes we’ll publish sample models, and you can download a guide that will teach you three different models, but we really tailor the model to your business. And so whether you are a franchise or you want a business that’s as professionally run as a franchise, mentorship through Two-Brain Business is the best way to get there. If this was helpful to you, please hit subscribe or leave a comment below with what kind of gym you own or want to own. And we’ll give you some stuff that will help.

Announcer (08:48):

That was Chris Cooper on Two-Brain Radio. Thanks for listening. Before you go hit subscribe. So you don’t miss a show. Now Coop’s back to close it out.

Chris Cooper (08:54):

We created the Gym Owner’s United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now, it has more than 5,800 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 Mentoring for 9Round and Other Fitness Franchise Owners appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

CBC’s Data-Free Deep Dive: Peloton, Soul Cycle Suffering

August brought more bad news for Peloton and Soul Cycle.

The former company announced on Aug. 12 that it was hacking jobs, raising prices on equipment and shuttering some stores.

About a week later, Soul Cycle closed 25 percent of its cycling studios, including the only location in Canada.

In response, a host of fitness-industry experts offered their opinions in a CBC.ca article titled “How the Luxury Fitness Bubble Popped as the Pandemic Wore On.”

Here are a few lines from that article: “The fitness industry is between a rock and a hard place, with two previously reliable business models floundering at this stage of the pandemic. While in-person studios are still recovering from government shutdowns, at-home fitness brands are losing clientele while people favour affordable brick-and-mortar gyms and fitness centres.” 

I can spot a few errors in that analysis.

First, I don’t think the at-home fitness model was all that reliable. I think it took hold during the pandemic, when governments closed gyms and fitness options were limited. But I’ve seen mountains of used at-home equipment at garage sales for decades, so I don’t think an 18-month, COVID-caused spike in at-home fitness suggests Peloton, MIRROR and others truly represented a “reliable business model.”

Second, the article suggests consumers “favour affordable brick-and-mortar gyms and fitness centres.” We aren’t given any stats to back that up. That statement demands data, and if the author can’t tell us exactly how revenue in cheap, access-only gyms has increased as Peloton and Soul Cycle suffered, the line should be deleted.

Instead of data, we get a vague quote from Natalia Petrzela, a professor who wrote “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession”:

“I think that explains the kind of popularity at the lower end of the consumer fitness market in terms of brick and mortar,” Petrzela told CBC.ca. “More people are going back to the gym in person, but it is the lower-end businesses that are thriving.”

“Kind of popularity,” “lower end,” “more” and “thriving”—we don’t have a single shred of data to add any weight to the analysis. Nothing.

In contrast, I’ll offer just a bit of early, raw, unanalyzed data from our State of the Industry survey (you can still fill it out here): The vast majority of gym owners in our survey said their revenue and profitability have returned to pre-COVID levels.

Here’s the really interesting part: The vast majority of survey respondents are selling coaching at premium rates. They are not what you might label “affordable brick-and-mortar gyms and fitness centres.”

You’ll have to forgive me for holding back hard numbers right now. The survey is ongoing, and Two-Brain hasn’t analyzed the numbers. But that analysis will start in a few days, and we’ll provide a huge package of hard data in December. (If you fill out the survey today, you’ll get the analysis before anyone else.)

My point: It’s one thing to write an article about the fitness industry offer data-free analysis. It’s quite another to collect data, analyze it and offer conclusions gym owners can actually use to make decisions.

We’re taking the latter path. It’s expensive and time consuming. But it’s worth it.

In December, we’ll be able to tell you exactly what’s happening in the fitness industry. You won’t see the words “kind of” or any vague terms. You’ll get hard numbers that allow you to improve your business.

Until then, please take the news articles and “expert opinions” you see with a grain of salt. No data? No dice.

And please take the time to fill out the State of the Industry survey before the end of Sept. 1. Your data will allow us to draw the firm conclusions that are currently absent from the fitness industry. The survey will be closed Sept. 2.

The post CBC’s Data-Free Deep Dive: Peloton, Soul Cycle Suffering appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

By the Numbers: Close Rate in July

Every month, we showcase one or two metrics that are important to gym owners. We highlight the best Two-Brain gyms in those categories and share their tips with you.

This month, we’re focusing on getting more clients. Three metrics help us diagnose problems and improve lead flow in a gym:

Set rate—how many leads book a No Sweat Intro.Show rate—how many of those who book actually show up.Close rate—how many of those who show up sign up for memberships.

Here are the top closers in Two-Brain last month:

Here are the top tips on improving your close rate from our leaders:

“I started using an iPad as part of our sales presentation.” (Read more about this strategy here.)

“Affinity marketing brought in 3 new members. So those are always 100% close rate.”

“I do a lot of sales role playing with our CSM, challenging her to approach every conversation differently, using the (Two-Brain) sales YouTube videos. I translate them for my team. Mentoring my team this way has helped me become better at sales too.”

“One of my new clients said that I’m crushing it and doing what every other gym (5 in the area) is not doing; i.e., creating helpful content. I learned this from Chris. I thought, ‘If he’s giving this stuff away, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a part of Two-Brain.’”

“Level Method is really helpful for our close rate.”

“I ask them, ‘What is it in life that you’re lacking and has got you looking for something new?’ If they’ve tried other things, they’ve obviously been unsuccessful elsewhere. I ask them why they came … for something new, what hasn’t worked for them in the past that has caused them to look for something else. I get them to reflect on what they didn’t like, so then I can touch on how we are different.”

“The NSI does come naturally to me as I’ve been in real estate for 21 years. The consultative approach is a universal sales skill, and I’ve already had lots of practice going into the gym business.”

“The sooner you get the lead to lead the conversation, (the) sooner you have it sold.”

“When a prospect comes in for (an) NSI, we’re very hands off. We sit back and listen to the client to hear what they’re looking for. Irish culture doesn’t want to be sold to. We lay on the value and benefits to their health, but we do not pressure.”

“I’m confident, because I know our product can add 5 years to their life.”

“We ask, ‘Imagine where you’ll be in 30 days.’”

“Zoom NSIs don’t work here. People will wait to do them in person. It’s a cultural thing.”

You might have noticed that some of these answers contradict each other. That’s why we’re a mentorship practice instead of a system that prescribes one method for everyone.

Your gym is different; you are different. The strategies you use should be carefully curated for your preferences, culture and style. A mentor can guide you to the strategies that will work for you.

The post By the Numbers: Close Rate in July appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

By the Numbers: Set and Show Rate for July

Every month, we showcase one or two metrics that are important to gym owners. We highlight the best Two-Brain gyms in those categories and share their tips with you.

This month, we’re focusing on getting more clients. Three metrics help us diagnose problems and improve lead flow in a gym:

Set rate—how many people book a No Sweat Intro (NSI).Show rate—how many of those who book actually show up.Close rate—how many of those who show up sign up for memberships.

Here are the top performers for set rate and show rate in Two-Brain last month:

Here are the top tips on improving set and show rates from our leaders:

“We send them a video message after they book an NSI. This has correlated into a higher show rate.”

“We publish a ton of free content on our social media platforms now, like ‘How to Use a Foam Roller.’”

“We spend $840 / mo. on Google ads with both images and text, and another $1,350 on Facebook ads.”

“We get most of our new NSIs from referrals—always invitations to bring a friend. No direct asking for referrals.”

“We used the lead-nurture script from (Two-Brain)—but instead of email, we used it in WhatsApp.”

“We just turned up our ad spend!”

“Whatever channel they come in, we use consistent follow-ups and nudging to show up. There’s no appreciable difference between text or emails for booking rates, and we make slight tweaks to the (Two-Brain) templates to make the messaging personal to each person.”

“New prospects have said, ‘We know you have a strong community because we’ve seen it!’”

“When we get a pricing inquiry, I just send an email introducing myself, asking (about) their goals & biggest current struggles, and then I suggest a couple of available time spots for an NSI.”

“Gym Lead Machine (Kilo) has really been essential to our lead-generation strategy. I let it do 99% of the heavy lifting.”

“I use Facebook ads exactly as they’re written in the Two-Brain marketing course and let them run.”

“We switched to a virtual NSI. People seem to find it more convenient and comfortable. After they book, I send them our gym guide—it shows them some pictures of the lifts we teach, which reinforces why we need the intro sessions.”

All of these are wonderful ideas. Which should you adopt? Ask your mentor.

In the next post in this series, I’ll share how the top gyms in Two-Brain sign up more people than gyms anywhere else.

The post By the Numbers: Set and Show Rate for July appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

9 Ways to Super-Size Your Gym’s Kids Program

Chris Cooper: (00:02)

Hey, it’s Chris Cooper here. And today I’m gonna give you nine ideas to grow your kids program. Part of our mission at Catalyst is to extend and enhance the lives of 7,000 people in Sault St. Marie. And we believe that the greatest impact can actually be made in the youngest people. And that means training people to learn how to be fit and to love fitness so that they continue to pursue it their whole life. I’m gonna teach you how to do the same. And if this episode is helpful to you, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so that I can keep talking about this stuff. So here we go. Nine ideas to grow your kids’ program. Most of you are going to have two levels to your kids program. We call that Junior Varsity and Senior Varsity at Catalyst. You might call it something else.

Chris Cooper: (00:47)

Okay. So we’re gonna start with your younger kids program. You might even have three layers if you do a preschool program. We don’t do that. It just burned my coaches out too quickly, but here’s what we do with the younger kids. The first week, we will let them do a free trial workout, right? But we’re gonna really carefully script that workout. It’s not just gonna be a free drop in, try it at any single time you want to, bring your buddy. We’re gonna set this up in advance. So the first one we’re going to do is invite a kids team. So let’s say that you’ve got a kid in your youth program and you know, maybe they’re eight or nine years old and you’re having a conversation with them. And you say, what other teams do you play for? And they say, oh, I’m in this Pop Warner basketball league or whatever.

Chris Cooper: (01:33)

And you say, that’s awesome. How many kids are on your team? We have nine kids on my team. Wonderful. Who coaches that for you? And they’ll give you their coach’s name. And then what you do is you make contact with this coach who is usually a volunteer. And you say, Hey, I just talked to this kid. They said they’re on your team. Thank you so much for volunteering and helping local kids. Would you like to bring the team in for a fun night at Catalyst? And then, you know, if the coach agrees, which honestly, in my experience, 70 to 80% of the time, they just jump on this. They think it’s awesome. You bring the team in, you have every kid bring their parent, they sign their waivers. They can come in and you do like a ninja challenge or something like that.

Chris Cooper: (02:14)

Maybe you do something that’s related to their sport, but you don’t have to. They like just doing obstacle courses. And then from there, you’ve got every kid’s name and the parent’s email, and you add them to your email list for kids programs. And in fact, if you’re really good at this, what you’ll say is, Hey, we’d run this program twice a week or three times a week. And if you wanna sign your kids up, we limit class size at this. Register here. Okay. The second idea to grow a smaller kids program is to host a birthday party. Very similar idea. What you’re saying to the parents though, is, would you like to host your kids’ birthday at Catalyst? You do have to charge for this because it is a lot of work and there’s gonna be cleanup involved. There might be some cake involved.

Chris Cooper: (02:57)

How much of that you handle is really up to you. But every kid that gets invited to that birthday party should be signing a waiver. They should be filling in their parents’ address so that you can contact the parent after. And I’ll tell you: with younger kids, trying something and finding it really, really fun is not just an easy win for your business. It’s also a huge relief to the parents. Most of the kids who are coming to these programs are not training to be competitive athletes in their sport. They should be doing these programs if they wanna get better at hockey or football, but most of these kids are there because their parents want to find a way for them to just get some exercise. And the best way to get the kid engaged is to make it fun. The best way to get the parent engaged is to show them their kids are having fun.

Chris Cooper: (03:44)

Okay. So next up, so that’s our first two ways: birthday parties and inviting a child’s team. Another one is bring a buddy or bring a brother. So could be bring a sister of course, too, which is like, bring your older or younger sibling to come and try a class too. That’s a different variation on the exact same thing. Okay. So another way is to reward an entire class. So what you can do is you can go to schools and you can say, Hey, I see that you’re doing this fundraiser. Schools are always doing fundraisers at least two to three times a year for something. And so what you say is we’d like to offer a prize and it’s not a donation, it’s a reward. So the top classroom that fundraises the most, or brings in the most cans or collects the most pennies or whatever it is, the top earning classroom gets to skip their morning classes and do a field trip to your gym. In that field trip, they’re just gonna have a super duper fun time and do obstacle courses and stuff. Okay. And of course, before the kids can come in the building, their parents need to sign a waiver, including their contact information, to which you will be sending ongoing information and education about kids programs at your gym. Okay? So I’m gonna call that three because the bring a sibling day is really the same as one of the first two. But if you invite a kids team, that’s a great one. If you host a birthday party, or if you give a field trip as a reward to a class, those are three ways to grow your kids’ program. Now let’s talk about older kids. Pre-teens and teenagers rely more on their friends’ recommendations than their parents’ advice. And in fact, sometimes if the parent is really pushing them toward fitness, the kid will push back.

Chris Cooper: (05:32)

Teenagers need to fight you on something. Every parent listening to this knows it. Don’t make fitness the thing that they’re gonna fight you about. Okay. So for teens, social media is more important. And by social media, I mean, what their friends are talking about, okay. Whether they’re posting about it on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or whatever they need, they wanna do the stuff that their friends are talking about. Okay. So what I do is I just pass the gym camera- Okay. My phone, or whoever- around after class. And I say, Hey, you guys can take pictures of each other if you want to. And we’re gonna post it to Instagram later. Okay. And they do all kinds of crazy, funny stuff. It’s really awesome. Most of it is not like show off stuff, but sometimes they get a little bit crazy like that and that’s fine.

Chris Cooper: (06:18)

That’s great. Right. One thing that’s really important here though, is that you have all of your kids sign a photo waiver, and you should be doing that anyway. Or have all the parents sign a photo waiver for the kids. It’s super duper important because you wanna highlight this stuff. If you wanna change the lives of people in your city, and you wanna have an impact, you wanna highlight young people doing this kind of stuff. And that means signing a photo release. It’s important that you have that and you not just take it for granted because unfortunately there are kids in all of our communities whose pictures should not be shown publicly. Maybe there’s a spousal debate over a divorce issue. Or, you know, maybe some parents are just sensitive because maybe the kid has a background where they’ve been approached inappropriately or whatever.

Chris Cooper: (07:06)

Maybe some parents are just being cautious. And I totally understand that, but you should have a photo release policy. And if a kid can’t have their picture shown at your gym, you’re gonna wanna make a decision about whether that kid can fit into your program or not. Or if you just need to train the coaches not to get that kid in the picture. Okay. So next up with the teens, we have several ideas on how to grow your preteen or your teen program. Okay. So the first one is invite a team for testing. So while a play day for the team is really awesome for younger kids, a test day or a challenge day has been way more successful for bringing preteens and teens to our gym. So what we do is we connect with their coach and then we offer the service. Okay.

Chris Cooper: (07:52)

And we’ll test on the 10 physical skills or we’ll make kind of like a combine. So what we could do is we could talk to, we have a lot of hockey players. What team do you play for? Who is your coach? Connect with the coach. Coach, we’re having an amazing time training Sally at our gym. She’s doing a great job. I’m sure you’ve seen the changes on the ice. And would you like to bring the team in for a fun team combine to kick the season off? The second one is to host a free seminar. So kids and often their parents, they don’t know what to eat between games or before games or after games if they play a sport. And so many of them eat based on the nutritional strategy that their parent maybe got in the seventies, or maybe their coach got, right?

Chris Cooper: (08:34)

So they carb load as if they’re gonna run a marathon every single day. So nutrition seminars appeal to parents and coaches, because they don’t infringe on the coach’s locus of control. No coach will generally say I’m a nutrition expert. And so they won’t feel threatened when you say, Hey, you wanna bring your team in and we’ll teach them how to really work out or how to really improve physically. Okay. Coaches are unthreatened by the nutrition. Parents are attracted to the nutrition seminar. You’re gonna call it, like, strategic eating for sport or something like that and bring them in for that. Okay. The third one is to send letters to sports teams. So we book about a dozen sports teams every year, including hockey, baseball, figure skating, cross country skiing, football, baseball. We had a biathlon team last year. And as the coach of one hockey team told me, you guys were the only ones who could give us a price in writing.

Chris Cooper: (09:28)

You just seem more professional. More than ever these days, coaches have to be careful about who they expose their teams to. There’s risk of injury, but they’re also taught, you have to treat the kids in a professional manner. You know, as a volunteer coach myself, I know you have to go through a lot of respect in sport training and stuff like that. And so coaches wanna deal with professionals. And so if you just send a letter to all these sports teams saying, here is what we do at Catalyst, here’s how we can help your kids improve. Here’s how we make it fun. You’re probably going to get some sign up. Next tip is to focus on fringe sports. So while in our town, there are at least half a dozen quote-unquote “hockey trainers” who try to focus on improving hockey skills.

Chris Cooper: (10:17)

None of them really seem interested in helping figure skaters jump better or downhill ski racers stay tighter in their turns. And neither of those sports are cheap, right? And both of those sports are full of injuries. So we have the power to help those kids too. And the next tip is stay in front of ’em. We use email campaigns to share the stories of our clients year round. When teen athletes take a break, they’re usually not gone forever, unless they just forget about you. So consistent emails from our gym draws their eyes back to our program. And of course, it’s usually the parent getting the email, but consistent posting on social media about your kids programs, especially Instagram, TikTok right now, that gets their eyes on your program. And so they don’t forget about you and go looking for something different. So from there, you can create a sense of urgency too.

Chris Cooper: (11:08)

So you can send their parents an email saying, we’re planning on our summer kids program. Our goal is to help your kids find exercise they’ll love for a lifetime. We love to fill our program with the best kids. So if your kid has a bestie, make sure that you invite them before the program fills, ’cause we wanna get just the best kids in there. And so if you’ve got that email program going, they’ll be expecting emails from you. And that personalized invite helps you fill the group fast. Okay. Finally, in “Help First” is our final strategy that I wanna share with you. And you know, this really came about because in early 2015, I was doing this free nutrition seminar at a local business. And during the Q&A period, this woman said, I saw you behind the bench at a hockey game on the weekend, your kids’ team played my kids’ team at 7:00 AM.

Chris Cooper: (11:59)

Why did your kids have so much energy that early? And I responded that I had written this nutrition one-pager for the parents of the kids on our team. And it just had some really simple advice. Like don’t eat donuts before practice, don’t have caffeinated drinks at eight years old, just drink water and not Gatorade in our bottles. And so her next question was the obvious one, right? How do I get that sheet? And so I put this sheet together called “How to feed a hockey animal” and I just put it on our website. So when parents filled out the form on that page, they got this one sheet nutrition guidelines, and then they started getting our other emails too. And so I shared some documents with them at the time that I had written for the CrossFit Journal called “No squats for the coal miner’s daughter” and “Fitness through sports”.

Chris Cooper: (12:45)

And then I would send them another email about our program. And then from there we were getting a ton of signups and that just compounded to the point where we didn’t do any marketing for like the next five years, because we were just getting so much growth from the nine strategies that I’ve just shared. So let me just quickly recap. If you’ve got two programs, younger kids and older kids, you have to have different growth strategies for each. For the younger kids, invite their team to do like a ninja challenge at your gym. Okay. And you’re gonna just like, do this through the parents, second: birthday parties, third: set up a class reward with a local school or a group that’s doing fundraising. For the older kids, invite their team for testing or a combine day, host a free seminar on nutrition, send letters out to all the sports teams in advance, focus on the fringe sports, stay in front of them and practice “Help First”. Find the questions that people in your community are asking to help their kids and answer those questions. That’s it for me. That’s nine ways to grow your kids’ program in your gym, no matter what you’re doing. And I really think these are important programs to grow the impact of long term health and fitness in your community.

Mike Warkentin: (13:57)

That was Chris Cooper on Two-Brain Radio. Thanks for listening. Before you go, hit subscribe so you don’t miss a show. Now Coop’s back to close it out.

Chris Cooper: (14:05)

We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now it has more than 5,800 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 9 Ways to Super-Size Your Gym’s Kids Program appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Two-Brain’s 2022 State of the Industry Survey Is Live!

Which direction would you prefer as a gym owner?

This: “You should totally do this at your gym. It worked for me.”

Or this: “We reviewed thousands of data points collected over years, and then we tested this tactic thoroughly. We can tell you with certainty that it will measurably improve your business.”

If you prefer the first approach, feel free to click out of this article now. I wish you all the best.

If you prefer the second approach, read on.

Two-Brain’s entire program is based on data. That’s why it produces swift, huge return on investment, and it’s why mentorship is producing more and more certified millionaires.

Chris Cooper and his team have collected an incredible data set, so we can quickly discard nonsense, BS, flashes in the pan and one-hit wonders when it comes to gym-building tactics. To be sure the remaining stuff is legit, we test it. If it passes a rigorous test, Two-Brain rolls the tactics out to clients, and we produce some free content to help other gym owners, too.

So where does the data come from? We collect it from our clients, and software providers supply it to help us improve the industry. And we get it right from Ground Zero—from gym owners just like you.

Every year, we collect data directly from gym owners in our State of the Industry survey, and we publish it—with analysis—in a special report. In 2022, after two tumultuous years, we need your input more than ever so we can present the info you need to succeed in 2023.

Fill out the 2023 State of the Industry survey.

The survey will take you about five minutes. After we close the survey in September, we’ll set to work on analysis. We retain an independent data expert to package the data, and our team digs into the numbers to tell you exactly what’s happening in our industry right now.

In December, we’ll publish the detailed report and share it with you so you can use the numbers to make good decisions.

And if you want an expert to help you move even faster, you can work with a mentor to blow past the averages in the report and reach greater levels of success.

Here’s the survey one more time: 2023 State of the Industry survey.

The post Two-Brain’s 2022 State of the Industry Survey Is Live! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.