Chris Cooper's Blog, page 88

How to Sell Supplements in Your Gym the Smart Way

Chris Cooper: (00:01)

Selling supplements in your gym has changed a lot in the last few years. And today I’m joined by Mike Shelly of Thorne. And we’re gonna tell you how to sell supplements in your gym with low risk, how to choose quality supplements, how to make sure that you’re getting a margin on it, when it’s best to recommend supplements and all that other great stuff. So, Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Shelly: (00:23)

Hey Chris, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate being on with you.

Chris Cooper: (00:25)
Yeah. So there are people in the audience who have never heard of Thorne. And to be honest, I hadn’t a couple years ago, and then you were introduced as part of the Crossfit APN and I started digging in, and the story just got more and more interesting as I went. So can you give us like the three minute version of, who is Thorne? Where did you come from and you know, why are you at the Two-Brain Summit?

Mike Shelly: (00:48)

Yeah. And I would say I had a similar experience with Thorne. I came from a training background myself and the CEO of Thorne ended up being referred to this facility and we were training high, like, elite hockey players at the time. And basically he’s like, I work for this company Thorne, it’s been around since- or he runs this company Thorne, it’s been around since the mid eighties. And I’m like, I’ve never heard of this. And so anyway, going down that rabbit hole, the company was founded in 1984, which is really hard to believe it’s almost 40 years old now, but predominantly it was servicing the functional medicine community, and that’s by and large why all of us in the sort of fitness and performance space have just never heard of it, quite frankly. Up until about eight years ago, which is when I was fortunate enough to join the company, you couldn’t even buy it unless you went through a doctor. Like, you couldn’t even buy it on Thorne.com.

Mike Shelly: (01:47)

And so a lot of that has shifted, where now we, you know, obviously you can find it on the website, and you can find it in specific gyms. And we’re trying to grow that side of the house now. About eight years ago was when we started expanding the NSF certified for sport line, which is basically the products that we have that are tested against banned substances. And so from that point on we’ve branched out into professional collegiate sports, into fitness, now we’re a partner of CrossFit, of course. And then, you know, excited to be at the Two-Brain Summit with you guys, was just sort of keep peeling back the layers of the onion, if you will, and expanding and growing. Another one of our partners now is the UFC. And so all of that is just originated in this company that nobody’s ever heard of, to start way back in the mid eighties to now, we’re hoping to come on like a storm, so to speak and really get out for all the right reasons.

Chris Cooper: (02:47)

That’s cool. And so I did go back into my archives and I was curious about this. I looked at some supplements that I’d been sold when I visited a local naturopath, maybe about a decade ago, and they were Thorne supplements. And so, you know, we were being introduced at the time to like, I guess she would’ve called a medical grade. But now, you know, how is that being perceived in the gym space, that there’s this higher level of supplements available out there? What’s the response been?

Mike Shelly: (03:19)

Extremely good in that I think the consumer is now becoming a lot smarter and more aware, just of the general landscape of nutritional supplementation and they are craving the high quality nutritional supplement. I think if you just did a little bit of research, you could easily see, and we hear stories all the time about, you know, maybe somebody that has taken something that caused an adverse reaction, or in some cases had an extreme adverse reaction and passed away if there was something that was really bad that was in that product. And so the industry is regulated. That’s kind of a misnomer where people think, oh, it’s like the wild west, you know, and the FDA doesn’t care. That’s actually not true. They do regulate it. It’s just a little bit different than food or the pharmaceutical industry, but Thorne has always just kind of approached it from the perspective of, well, let’s just see what we can do to provide the highest quality product that we can, that doesn’t have any binders or, you know, fillers or flowing agents.

Mike Shelly: (04:29)

You know, anything that is not essential for production or offers a therapeutic benefit of some kind. And so I think when you have the history that we do, 30 plus years of servicing the functional medicine community, and then now you start to transition that quality over into a sports performance space where they know that the products are really, really high quality, but they actually work with the intended purposes. We’re just finding that it’s a huge need that more and more people are really passionate about.

Chris Cooper: (05:05)

Okay, so Thorne and Two-Brain have produced a guide that you can download to help you sell supplements in your gym. And the goal is not just to push supplements, but actually to define what a client needs and then help them get only what they need. Right? Gym owners are facing three challenges, Mike, and we’re gonna go through these in order. And the first is quality. We don’t wanna push junk that they would get down the street at the GNC or whatever. The second is margin. Like, the gym owner has to be able to make money at this, or they’ve got too much other stuff to do on their plate. And the third is like, inventorying this stuff, like, do you wanna actually tie up your cash in inventorying them? And so, you know, starting a couple years ago, when we started talking about how to actually sell supplements, we started getting some of these plans together. I think maybe we should start with quality. Because I know Thorne does work with the Olympics in some level, right?

Mike Shelly: (06:03)

Yeah. So in terms of the Olympic partnerships, we have a bunch of US national teams that we support. That process originated several years ago where an individual named Wes Barnett, who still works at Thorne now, is basically our head of performance. He’s a two-time Olympian himself in the sport of weightlifting. And he was at the USOC and he’s had a bunch of different roles there. He’s one of the nicest human beings you’ve ever met. One of the more higher integrity individuals I’ve ever met personally. And so it started off, if you will, with a pursuit of trying to find a high quality product that you could recommend safely to Olympic athletes, or any drug tested athlete for that matter. A lot of times, or originally, the stance was just don’t recommend anything.

Mike Shelly: (07:06)

And that was probably the safest way to do it, but it was unrealistic, I think in a lot of respects because athletes are still looking for supplementation or solutions that they can utilize to help them through training, working out competitions, et cetera. And sort of, Wes, in a lot of ways, spearheaded the approach. And just trying to find the solution that where the USOC could basically say, you know, “tread carefully, but this is a brand that we trust.” It was about a three year vetting process, as I understand it. And you know that, I mean, we had to obviously audit everything, show how we go through the manufacturing processes, where we source raw materials from, the testing processes through production, getting the banned substance testing through NSF to ensure that it is safe.

Mike Shelly: (08:05)

And so, you know, when you do that and you open up the doors, so to speak. After that there was a private endorsement, if you will, where the USOC felt comfortable enough to make the recommendations and say, okay, this was a brand that we feel is okay to recommend. And that is a very huge step as you can probably imagine. And that’s really what led to other partnerships that we have too, like the UFC, PI, as an example. And honestly, that’s what led us down the path with CrossFit as well. So from a quality perspective, one of the things that I was the most impressed about, even as I was learning about the brand before I had officially joined the company was just that the production, or the processes that are in place to even make the product that is going to get shipped out to somebody, there’s a massive no list that we have. Which, all that means is basically we will not use anything that is artificial to manufacture the products.

Mike Shelly: (09:13)

We don’t use any binders or fillers or flowing agents, things like that. We don’t use magnesium stearate in our products as well. And that’s a pretty important part that just basically helps to make production a little bit easier. But part of the reason why we don’t use it is because it makes absorption unpredictable. And so, you know, everything at Thorne is geared towards the experience of the client or the patient, if you will, as it pertains to the therapeutic benefit. So if it really doesn’t have a purpose or serve a purpose, it doesn’t go in the product. We have an entire medical affairs team at Thorne that is naturopathic doctors, PhDs, MDs, you know, so in terms of quality, you really can’t get any better in my opinion, because I just know all of the things that we do internally as a brand.

Mike Shelly: (10:07)

And that’s all for the sole purpose of again, serving the client or the patient that is going to place their trust in us to say, all right, I need to do something about my health, or I’m gonna intentionally choose a supplement. I’m therefore going to choose this. And I need that to do this for me. Right. Like the goal isn’t like, Hey, you’re all deficient in powder, right? Like, how much powder can we sell you and push on you? That’s not it at all. I think what we’re really looking at are performance metrics across the board. So performance can be measured by anything, you know. Is that performance in the gym? Is that performance in health, is that performance in managing and supporting inflammation in your system so that you feel better? Without going too far, that’s what honestly is leading us down the path for diagnostics and things like that, because the end goal is always, how can we do the very best for the people that trust us the most with their hard earned money? And so from a quality side, I think all of the partnerships are just a byproduct of us, hopefully doing the very best that we can when it comes to just manufacturing something that people trust to purchase.

Chris Cooper: (11:22)

All right. And that’s paid off, I mean, USOC is one thing, but you also show up on the very short list of recommended products by Precision Nutrition, for example, Wild Health. So that that’s awesome, man. When affiliates are thinking, should I sell supplements? I think the real question they should be asking is, are my clients buying supplements? Because in my experience they are, and they can either buy them from you, or they can go talk to the 18 year old who’s paid commission down at the GNC and take her recommendation. So what are the top five maybe supplements that you see gym owners selling?

Mike Shelly: (11:59)

Yeah. So, it’s a great question. And I think the best way to start is usually simple solutions always work best. And you know, most people will consume something like a whey protein for post-workout nutrition. They’ll want something intra, so you can use like an electrolyte, like a catalyte or amino acids, like our amino complex fish oil is pretty important today. So you can do that and then you can do another product like creatine to help around training. I would probably start with those five. And then from there it’s more about seeing how the foundational other aspects that you wanna incorporate. You can do a basic multi, you can do a daily greens that we’ve recently come out with, and that’s a pretty good place to start without getting too crazy. The beauty of Thorne is that we do have a lot of other options past that if you wanted to really get sophisticated, but if you wanted to just stick to the basics, we do have a lot of these options too.

Mike Shelly: (13:07)

Foundations can start and extend a little bit more too, like vitamin D or a magnesium, but I think outside of that, just really heavy hitters where they feel like they get big bang for their buck, so to speak, can go a long way. And that’s also products that I would believe they’re consuming normally anyway, you know, somebody’s just like, ah, I consume, I need protein post-workout, or I need an electrolyte to help me get through because I’m sweating profusely. And I want to just make sure I’m not cramping up, or my muscle tissue has what’s necessary to get through this endurance training session. Or whatever the case may be. And so we can definitely start with that and then get fancier from there.

Chris Cooper: (13:53)

That’s great, man. I can personally attest to catalyte is my favorite Thorne product. And if you have endurance athletes in your gym, they’re probably taking noom tablets anyway. Catalyte is just way better and comes from a better source. So if we start off with those five or half dozen, anyway, the next question that a lot of gym owners come up with is like, well, how much do I inventory? You know, if I’ve only got a thousand dollars this month, I don’t wanna tie that up in inventory. So what some companies have done is they’ve created like an online storefront for you. And so your clients can just be given your URL or your affiliate link, and, you know, they buy online, you don’t stock anything and the company ships it. One of those companies is Thorne and Thorne uses a dispensary system. So Mike, can you maybe walk us through how the dispensary works?

Mike Shelly: (14:45)

Sure. It’s exactly like you had articulated, Chris. It’s effectively an online store front that somebody, you can curate the line down to these more simple solutions, the five or half dozen that we talked about, to make it easy for them so that you don’t have to carry any inventory. Thorne will ship the product for you to the client. The client will effectively have their own login that will then be technically tied to the gym or the facility. And the commission margins are basically still the same as if you were to stock it wholesale to retail, brick and mortar. So average is ballpark about 47%. The other thing that I think is a differentiating factor from Thorne’s side that is hopefully business friendly is that we don’t have any minimum order requirements. So even if you did wanna have some on the shelf, which I think is a good idea, but we’re not gonna beholden you to,

Mike Shelly: (15:49)

Oh, you have to get a case or you have to get set dollar amount to get this at wholesale pricing. We don’t do that. If you just wanted to purchase one bottle, you can do that. Free shipping is over $99. It’s pretty easy to get to that. With having some product stock on the shelves, I find that most gyms are successful that have those staples that are on site, if you will. Anything fancier, you can drive to the online dispensary for them. And then, like I said, the client can just purchase it at their leisure. You’ll be able to see all the information. And then the margin is effectively still the same, wholesale to purchase price. There’s an a bit, there’s an option for them to offer a discount to the client if they wanted to. That’s totally up to the gym’s discretion. But we do have that capability of doing that. No codes, none of that. So we tried to really create this system that was really business friendly to them so that we could remove a lot of the blocks, if you will, that would prevent them from doing it, you know, while forcing them to not have to pay so much up front in terms of money for inventory.

Chris Cooper: (17:03)

Okay. So one of the tips that we’re going to share in this free guide, and you can get it through a link in the show notes, or you can join GymOwnersUnited.com, and we’ll just give it to you. One of the tips that we’re gonna share there is a taster night. So in this case you would wanna have a little bit of inventory on hand, so you can mix up a few samples, do some, you know, bring a buddy workout or whatever, and give away some samples to try. So if I was going to invest $500, let’s say in stocking and inventory, what should I bring in, Mike? Like, would you get two different flavors of protein or would you get five different supplements or how would you do it?

Mike Shelly: (17:42)

I would probably start very simple. Maybe catalyte and aminos and one of the proteins, just to kind of introduce it to people because this is sort of their first and you don’t wanna, I think, make it too complicated right out the gate. So that you then focus on, you know, something where they’re not gonna buy it initially in some cases, which is why you do the taste test night, you know, if they haven’t tasted it. And so, but we find that the conversion rates are pretty high because people kind of sit and they taste and they go, actually, this is really good, you know? And then you can start to tell that story of like, there’s no artificial ingredients, there’s no sweeteners, there’s no, you know, stuff like that in there. But usually about three is what I see works really well, depending on the direction you want to go.

Mike Shelly: (18:33)

At the CrossFit games last year, a little quick story, one of the things that we had catalyte and amino complex in the dispensing machines, we ended up mixing them together, believe it or not. And it tasted really, really good. So that, yeah, people were like, I just want the blend. Just give me the blend and I’m good. And so you can combine them too. You can do two in a combo to see, and we’ve done that at a few facilities as well, and you kind of get the person that’s like, wow, that’s actually really good. And so that’s a way to do that too. And we’re not talking about very many skews. I mean, if you just did that, that’s two skews. If you wanted to add the protein, there’s three, you know, and one tub easily serves a lot of samples in all honesty. So to do this from an investment perspective, really isn’t very much. And usually I find people then go, okay, this is really cool. Where do I get it? Well, you can either buy it at the front or you can go to the dispensary and have it set up, and then it’ll be shipped to your house in a few days.

Chris Cooper: (19:36)

All right, man, I love it. The next way is one that I think is even more appropriate for coaches, but some coaches might feel a little weird about it at first. And that is, you’re sitting down with a client at their goal review and you’re looking at their nutrition log and you’re saying, you’re just not getting enough protein. And they say, I know I’m trying, I’m trying. And you say, have you ever tried a protein supplement? And then, you know, maybe that’s when you recommend it. But Mike, like, is there a better way for you to make one-on-one recommendations to each of your clients who need supplements?

Mike Shelly: (20:12)

There’s a couple ways that you could probably do this. I have seen some of the best facilities that are incorporating it in the scenario that you’re talking about as a part of a nutrition program where, you know, they’re like, okay, how do I do this? It’s here. You’re like, here’s your list. Well, where do I get that? It’s on the dispensary. You can add it here. There’s a way to make the recommendations on the back end if you wanted to utilize that tool set as well, that’s an option also. So you can hit ’em from multiple angles, but that personal connection where they’re sitting down with the nutrition coach is usually the best way to do that. And you can drive them to whatever point of sale. You know, I think it’s the most appropriate if it’s at the front desk or if it’s organizing it on the back end from a dispensary side to do that. But I know obviously as Two-Brain sort of shifts and moves into nutrition coaching, this is gonna be something that I think is a huge part that can get added into that and just being the right tool for the right time, if you will. I think all we’ve ever seen ourselves as at Thorne is just the right tool when somebody wants to pull it out. Did that answer that question that you’re looking for?

Chris Cooper: (21:36)

Yeah, man, and to go even deeper, what should a coach be feeling like when they have a client who’s just not hitting their goals and they dig into their diet and they determine like, okay, this person actually could use a supplement. How should they broach that subject? What should they be cautious of? Should they feel weird about it or not?

Mike Shelly: (21:57)

I don’t think that they should feel weird. I think it comes down to being really honest about what the client wants to accomplish, because if they have, if you’re reviewing a nutrition log with them and they’re hitting like 80% of it, right. And you just can see like, okay, you know, you’re only drinking water during a workout, you can see that maybe you need a little bit of help either through consuming electrolytes or maybe doing aminos kind of around the lift. If that’s the case, they can give it a shot. And then they’ll probably notice the performance side supported quite a bit by utilizing that, or even adding the post workout shake, if it’s appropriate to just say, Hey, look, I mean, the reality is you’re in here doing all of the work, but this is one hour.

Mike Shelly: (22:56)

If you will, right. You’ve got 23 others in the rest of the day that you have to then utilize to basically help you. Like, we all know we’re not building muscle during the lift. Right. You’re tearing the system down. And so the question then is, well, how much are you building it back up in the off time? Are you sleeping well, are you eating well? Are you supplementing appropriately? If you should be. And I think that’s how you can probably broach that topic so that it doesn’t come from, you know, it comes from a good place of like, my intentions are obviously just to help you increase your performance level. The reality is is that there are tactics that you can utilize and tool sets to help you with this, metabolically speaking. Postworkout, you have a pretty big window, or I should say a smaller window there to do something.

Mike Shelly: (23:51)

If you wanted to do that, right. If you wanted to incorporate postworkout nutrition or supplementation, that’s where you’d be utilizing a tool. And so I think if the client is ready for it, by all means. It was a joke. I’ll tell you a quick, funny story. When I was in the training world, I would have moms that would come in with youth athletes that are like, I want my son to be really explosive. And I’m like, okay, your son eats corn dogs and pizza, and can’t do 10 pushups. And they’re like, what creatine should I buy? I’m like, I’m sorry. Like, I don’t think that you should buy creatine. Like, I know this is crazy. I’m not going to push powder because the reality is, is that steak and potatoes and training hard is going to do way more for that person than it is to utilize something that’s just a bandaid approach. Right? And so I think if we know that this person is already down the route and checking all the boxes for all these things, then you can easily comfortably say, you’re totally ready to do this. This is another piece that can help you unlock something or next level of performance. And then, you know, let’s just see where it goes from there.

Chris Cooper: (24:59)

All right, man. So this leads us to a third tip that you can get from this guide. And there’s lots more in there. So you can just download it for free from the show notes or at GymOwnersUnited.com. But one tip that you can do is if you stock, or if you generally even recommend five different supplements, you can have that list right in front of you. And when a client is sitting across from you, you can be looking at their nutrition tracking log or their habit sheet or whatever it is. And you can just go down your list and you can say, okay, well, you know, looks like your lifts are improving. So I’m gonna scratch creatine off the list. I don’t think you need that right now. And you’re not really outside in the heat doing a lot of endurance based stuff. So I don’t think you need an electrolyte. We can scratch that off the list. Now a whey protein though, I think might be a good idea. And what you’re doing there is you’re just kind of building trust, but also demonstrating to the client, I’m not just pushing stuff on you because I’m making an extra dollar here.

Mike Shelly: (25:53)

Yeah. A hundred percent. And I think the most important thing, and this comes from, I believe how not only the most successful gyms function in terms of a client-gym relationship, but even how Thorne functions from a client-vendor relationship, if you will, is that it’s a hundred percent the way that you just discussed. Yes, we’re in the business of selling supplements, but in all honesty, I think if you were to pull anybody away from Thorne, we’re really in the business of increasing performance metrics with people and doing that with the highest possible quality tools that we can. In this case, obviously we sell supplements and we, in my opinion, make the best ones out there, but pushing the right product to the client when they’re ready is I think the most important thing, because at the end, what we want to do is elevate their performance.

Mike Shelly: (26:50)

And if anybody has any doubts about what we’re doing here at Thorne, I would then just go drive back to how we’re trying to jump into the diagnostic space, because we’re utilizing the data from that to really try to understand, and then make those recommendations appropriately to that person. Now that’s a whole other complicated system, but I only say that from the perspective of, we don’t wanna just push powder. Like, we’re getting away from “here’s your giant box that you need to buy” and that’s it, right? It’s very intentional consumption so that we get the response and elevate the health metrics and performance metrics of the people that trust us enough to utilize the product. So then a byproduct of that is that people are gonna ask like, Johnny, what’s going on with you? You’re just crushing it over here. You know? And it’s like, well, I started doing these little things, right. Small behaviors make massive changes for a lot of people. And I think even as something is doing, like you’re saying, it’s like, just start with protein, let’s see where we get. And then it’s always like, all right, now, what’s next. Right? Where, where do I go? How do I move forward from this? It’s like, well, alright, let’s just do it, but let’s do it in the best way for you.

Chris Cooper: (28:07)

I think that diagnostic conversation, and I know we’re going a little bit over the time that we planned here, but I think that’s really important because in the next year or two, more and more gyms are gonna keep exploring this option of, maybe it’s blood testing or whatever, what are the testing options available through Thorne? And how do they work for the gym owner?

Mike Shelly: (28:25)

Yeah. So right now we have a series of home test kits that gym members can utilize. It’s a series of either blood or urine, and this is all depending on the biomarker that’s being tested, or in the new case, if you want to do a stool test, we have a new patented microbiome collection wipe, which is first ever out to basically collect a stool sample, which is- if you’ve ever done a normal stool sample, you’ll appreciate the fact that we’ve come out with this collection method. And you know, the space is changing dramatically. It’s every week, it seems like, you know, and I think people are really interested in bringing healthcare to the home if you will, in a lot of cases, which is the jump into telehealth.

Mike Shelly: (29:25)

But I think they’re really concerned with the data because they want to, again, make the right choices for the right reasons and they wanna see what’s going on. That’s not for everybody. You don’t have to utilize this test to take advantage of it. We basically offer, at any point you can jump in on the product offering or the spectrum. You could do something as basic as a vitamin D test, if you wanted to. Or if you wanted to jump into a more elaborate test, there’s a weight management test that will test a lot more biomarkers. You could do the microbiome test that will give you a lot of information. And in a lot of cases, at the end, it will give you the information or the data that comes out of it, but it will help you make an informed choice as to what, maybe, you should consume depending on the data that you have.

Mike Shelly: (30:17)

So you may be too high in something, you may be too low in something. This is where it’s like, okay, where are my gaps now? Can I make a behavioral change from a food perspective to handle that? And if I do need to supplement, what might that be? You know? And so now you’re getting really targeted for what you’re doing. And so we just put that out there because we feel like it’s extremely valuable. It’s extremely responsible for how we envision moving forward, as it pertains to nutritional supplementation and health and nutrition. We just launched today, actually some larger venous blood draw kits that will, or tests that will test more biomarkers if you wanted to do that. And so we sort of feel like we wanted to give everybody an option to jump in on, again, at any degree that they felt is appropriate for them.

Mike Shelly: (31:13)

We’re working on expanding this beyond the United States, but right now it’s predominantly in the US. But the intent is obviously to just keep going down this route of testing and offering these different choices for the gym that wanted to take advantage of it. I will say from a medical professional side, making recommendations is also something that needs to be factored in, but usually we always encourage you to go down and seek out like a healthcare practitioner, if it is appropriate to do that. And that’s just so that obviously the gym owner doesn’t stray too far away from their lane, but there’s a network then to start today. I mean, we all know this, right? It’s like, you don’t wanna be making recommendations that a doctor wouldn’t make, but you can still get them started.

Mike Shelly: (32:06)

So if somebody is interested and you can be the tip of the spear, cause in a lot of cases, we all know that the trainer is the tip of the spear with people, you know? And so they could be coming in going, Hey, I’m dealing with this, like, have you talked to your doctor about this? They’re like, no. It’s like, well, okay, you should, right. And this is the group that’s figuring this out because they see them and they care the most about their health. And so I think that just highlights the dynamic of what it’s like to be a caring individual, to be a trainer that cares about the clients and then obviously trying to provide the very best that we can for them.

Chris Cooper: (32:38)

Alright. So that was great. Thanks Mike. An amazing response. And I think that question is gonna come up more in the next couple years, the testing, and I love that you led to working with other local practitioners. I think that’s just an amazing point and more gyms should be doing that. If you’d like this free guide on selling supplements in your gym, you can download it from the show notes. It’s co-published by Thorne at Two-Brain Business, you can go to GymOwnersUnited.com and just ask for it and we’ll give it to you. Mike, thanks so much for being here, man. It’s been awesome to have you answer these questions. And it’s Thorne.com. There’s a bunch of amazing resources on there too. Like if you have questions about greens or the gut and your microbiome, that’s a big topic. There’s resources there that you can share with your clients that you can learn yourself. There’s a podcast, and you know, Thorne is always right about answering questions. If you’re a Two-Brain client, you can go on the Two-Brain app, go to Thorne’s post in the marketplace and you can see some special, really awesome deals there for Two-Brain gyms too. Mike, thanks so much.

Mike Shelly: (33:42)

Chris, thank you so much as well. It’s always fun to be on with you, man. All right, bye.

Mike Warkentin: (33:49)

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

Chris Cooper: (33:55)

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. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.

The post How to Sell Supplements in Your Gym the Smart Way appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How Conversation Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Gym

Chris Cooper (00:02):

“Hey, Coop, can you tell me how your lead-nurture process works at Two-Brain?” I got this email a couple of weeks ago, and it really made me smile because the person writing the email is in our lead-nurture process—but it doesn’t feel that way. The secret is conversation marketing. And today I’m gonna tell you step by step how conversation marketing works, and how it can work for your gym. If this episode is helpful to you, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving us a five-star review. We publish this stuff for free all the time. We really want to help gym owners. And the best way that I can do that is when I know something is hitting home for you, I can make more content like that. So conversation marketing, as a little bit of a background if you’re just starting to listen to this podcast, I’ve been writing love letters to gym owners for almost 10 years now. Every day, over a dozen people write me back with questions like this: “Hey, can you tell me how your lead-nurture process works for Two-Brain?” I also interview gym owners who are successful on our podcast, and we tell stories about great gym owners on our YouTube channel and on social media. A few times a day, I pop into our free Facebook group, Gym Owners United, to answer questions and share resources. If you’re not in that group, you can just go to gymownersunited.com and we’ll redirect you straight into the Facebook group. Every single day, I get Facebook messages from 30 to 40 different people. I think my record is 120 asking for guidance or resources. And it’s all part of my conversations with new friends. Like you, the average person is in a six-month conversation with me before they buy anything. And usually people wind up asking for mentorship when the time is right for them.

Chris Cooper (01:50):

So the right answer to the question I started this podcast with—“Hey, Coop, can you tell me about how your lead-nurture process for Two-Brain works?”—is you’re in it. If you wanna get good at marketing, you have to get good at conversations. Conversations bridge the gap between advertising and sales. Advertising is there to get somebody’s attention. Sales is there to get somebody’s commitment. But the space between the two of them has always been kind of a mystery, like the business plan of the Underpants Gnomes from “South Park.” Their profit plan was: Phase 1—steal underpants, Phase 3—profit. So what’s Phase 2? It’s conversations and conversation. Marketing is part content marketing, part lively chat and part persuasion. Some people would call this “lead-nurture strategy” or “building trust,” but I just call it “winning hearts and minds before people will buy from you.”

Chris Cooper (02:53):

They have to know you, like you and trust you. How do you get to know someone? How do you grow to like them? And how do you get them to trust you through conversations? And so today, I’m gonna give you some tactics to bridge the gap between awareness, where somebody’s heard of you, and commitment, where they buy something from you. And then we’re gonna get into some very specific steps about how this actually affects your retention, too. So whether you’re trying to grow your gym or just keep your members around longer, you need to learn conversation marketing. So here are the four steps to getting new signups. With conversation marketing, you build trust through conversations. Again, conversations bridge the gap between advertising and sales. And it doesn’t matter if you call this “lead nurture” or “affinity building.” You can call it whatever you want, but we’re all in the relationship business.

Chris Cooper (03:45):

And so we have to be good at this. Here are the four steps. Step 1: start a conversation. How do you meet somebody new? You meet somebody new by going first by starting a conversation. Good entrepreneurs aren’t always great salespeople, but they’re always good at making someone feel welcome and heard. So that means sharing a personal story. If you’re talking online or offering your hand to shake, if you’re meeting somebody in person, here’s exactly how to do it. If you’re meeting somebody in person, my best new-buddy pickup line is “good morning.” Now this was not an easy skill for me to learn. I’ve always been shy and kind of introverted, but wishing somebody a good morning? There’s no social risk. No, one’s gonna say “who the hell are you?” or “how dare you wish me a good morning?” or “get lost.” So offering a hand to shake is irresistible even in the post-COVID era.

Chris Cooper (04:43):

So try this: go through a local coffee shop drive-through or get four coffees standing in line—whatever. Walk next door to the business closest to your gym, hand over the coffee and say, “Hey, good morning. I’m Chris from next door.” You don’t have to think about the conversation from there because it will just take its own course. Usually they’ll respond with a question, but if they don’t, you can just say, “Hey, how’s business?” And then just carry on the conversation from there. You are good at having conversations. I guarantee it. You just need some practice starting conversations. And a coffee, a handshake, a smile and a “good morning” is the best way to start conversations. Now, if you’re online, make a milestone post that includes a number. Like this: “Today is my 100th consecutive day of practicing morning meditation.” Or “I have been married to this wonderful woman for 17 years today.”

Chris Cooper (05:39):

The milestone doesn’t matter as much as the sharing. And you should include a number when people comment on your post. Ask them if they’ve ever tried what you’ve been doing or achieved something similar. Like, “How long have you been married?” and then move them to private chat if they wanna talk about business. So if you say like, “Hey, I just spent my fifth consecutive day doing Zone 2 aerobic exercise and I feel better than I’ve felt in 20 years.” If they say “what is Zone 2?” you move them to private chat and carry on the conversation. Well, I learned this strategy from Richmond Dinh in our Tinker program. It works because milestone posts tell a story. And the more stories you tell, the more conversations you start. Step 2, whether online or in person, is to listen. So you need to get people talking.

Chris Cooper (06:30):

The reason that we’re all scared to start a conversation with a stranger is we don’t know what to say. So the solution is don’t talk about yourself. Just listen. I work with Bob Burg, the author of “The Go-Giver,” and he gave me these 10 feel-good questions. OK. So these are Bob Burg’s 10 feel-good questions. Trademarked. Try all 10. “How did you get started in the widget business? What do you enjoy most about your profession? What separates you and your company from the competition? What advice would you give someone just starting in the widget business? What’s one thing would you do with your business if you knew you couldn’t fail? What significant changes have you seen take place in your profession through the years? What do you see as the coming trends in the widget business? Can you describe the strangest or funniest incident you’ve experienced in your business? What ways have you found to be the most effective for promoting your business? What one sentence would you like people to use in describing the way you do business?” Now, some of these have to be adapted to feel more natural to you, but as an entrepreneur, it’s natural for you to ask these questions of new friends because you’re in business, too. So, “Hey, oh, you own a car wash. That’s amazing. How did you get started in the car-wash business?” Or, “Hey, what’s one significant change you’ve seen in the car-wash business in the last 10 years?” So Step 2 is just listen. Step 3 is to invite them to something. If you think that you have a great fit between coach—that’s you—and client—that’s them—tell them so and invite them to take the first step with you.

Chris Cooper (08:20):

So in person, if the person is talking about their goals, you can say, “those are great. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we go work out together at my gym? Just you and me. How’s Thursday afternoon?” Or online you can say, “I think I can help. I’m making my schedule up for next week and I have an opening on Thursday at 2 p.m. Would you be open to talking about the next step?” And of course we give you this full sell-by-chat template in our Growth and Tinker programs so that you can just kind of follow along, and it makes the conversation easier. Step 4 is sign ’em up and start changing their lives. You can’t help them unless they commit to you. So in person face to face or even over Zoom, ask them about their goal. Find out why that goal is important to them. Make a prescription to get them to their goal. If that’s a goal that you can help them reach, tell them the price, receive their money and start delivering on your promises.

Chris Cooper (09:12):

And of course we provide a full template for this in our RampUp and Growth programs. So start talking. People must know you, like you and trust you, and conversations are the only way to check all three of those boxes. Advertising might start a conversation, but advertising is a monologue. Conversations are a dialogue. Your goals are to start conversations, guide conversations, to being able to solve their problem and building relationships. Every relationship that you have must be fed or it will weaken. So you feed relationships with conversations, and next I’m gonna tell you how to keep feeding the relationships that you do have using conversation marketing for retention because you can’t build a business on one-night stands. Conversations are also required for retention. And so I just told you how to feed your relationships, to keep them alive. And you feed your relationships with conversations.

Chris Cooper (10:14):

So let’s start by having more conversations with your current clients. If you’re not asking your clients about their goals and tracking their progress, they will not be your clients for long. So start with your five best clients. Ask to take them out to coffee one by one, and start by asking these questions. “Hey, what led you to my gym in the first place? Hey, what else have you tried that you didn’t like as much? Hey, how can I serve you more?” And then you tell their story. So you interview them and you make them famous on your website and social channels. We teach this process in depth in our Growth Program, and then you move to the rest of your clients. So you book quarterly Goal Review Sessions with each of them to talk about their goals and measure their progress.

Chris Cooper (11:01):

Remember just because they swiped right one time on your ad doesn’t mean they’re ready to marry you. You have to keep dating your clients. Forever. Lack of conversation is the Number 1 predictor of divorce in marriage and in business. And of course we teach the goal review process in our RampUp and Growth programs, too. Now let’s talk about starting conversations with your former clients, because if you genuinely and authentically care about people, you will check in on them. Even when they’ve broken their commitment with you. Maybe your brother really ticked you off last week, but sooner or later, you have to send him a text and ask, “Bro, what are you up to?” Maybe your feelings were hurt when a client left, but unless they burned the bridge on the way out, they’re probably gonna come back someday, and they might just be waiting on an invitation. So start with a story.

Chris Cooper (11:50):

“Hey Joe, I was just remembering that time we … .” Or “hey, Jess, a memory just popped up on my Facebook feed. Remember that time? How are things going with you?” We shut out our former clients because our egos are bruised. When they leave, we feel like we need to win that relationship, but you don’t need to win the battle to win the war. You win when they come back. Of course, there will always be the 10 percent of former clients you don’t want back, and you can just let their stories end. So what is my lead-nurture strategy? I started this podcast on conversation marketing with a question: “Coop, what’s your lead-nurture process?” My process is this: Tell a story, start a conversation. If the conversation is positive, invite somebody to take the next step with you. But everything starts with a story. The very first blog post on my gym’s website was called “It’s all About the Story.” I wanted to give people in my city the opportunity to write a better story about themselves and their lives.

Chris Cooper (12:59):

Now I’m gonna tell you the strategy in a moment here, but really if you take nothing else away from this podcast, I want you to learn that telling stories, sharing stories, making your clients famous, these are all parts of the conversation. And you grow in your authority. You grow in the number of people in your audience. You grow in the like and the trust and the affinity that people have for you through a process that we call the Authority Ladder. This is how you build a personal brand by telling stories—because good stories spread. Good stories outlive bad stories, and good stories help people to know you, like you and trust you. So if you wanna build a personal brand that attracts people, you have to be a storyteller. OK? So you need to decide who is your audience, who you’re talking to and who you’ll dedicate the next year talking to through storytelling.

Chris Cooper (13:55):

These people are your niche, right? So you need to tell these people stories about your journey. And then you need to look at the questions that people in your audience are asking. Which questions can you answer? Which answers do they like most? And then tell them stories to make your answers stick. Then you need to decide which problems can you solve for your audience better than anybody else. And how can you turn your knowledge into results for them? And then what is the value of those results? Finally, you need to tell stories about your clients’ success. How will you know when your program is working? You need to audit your program, and then you need to iterate, and then you need to audit it again and you need to upgrade it. You need to tell stories about your client’s journey, and you need to do this for years, and you need to get better and better.

Chris Cooper (14:43):

And you need to always give clients your best and never stop making your program better. This is how we built Two-Brain Business. It’s been a 10-year conversation with gym owners like you. The most important part of building a personal brand is consistency. And that’s also where most people fail. You must talk to your audience daily. Authority, affinity—these are games of momentum, not first impressions. If you stop telling stories, everyone will think your story is over. You don’t have to tell the best stories. You don’t have to be the best storyteller, but you do have to start building a brand, and that requires a plan. We call that plan the Authority Ladder. It’s based on storytelling. And I’m so happy that you’re in this conversation with me. Thank you.

Mike Warkentin (15:32):

Don’t make a big mistake here. Subscribe for more shows just like this. Now here’s Chris one more time.

Chris Cooper (15:38):

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 How Conversation Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

“A Gym Is a Gym Is a—Why Do You Charge so Much?”

Here’s the title of a recent article in The Guardian: “Gym Membership: How to Get the Best Deals.”

For microgym owners, a better title would be:

“Things You Should Never Offer at Your Coaching Gym.”

The Guardian’s secondary headline: “Consider exactly what you need, then look out for special offers and free trials.”

The line was related to cost-saving advice about not signing up for gyms with swimming pools if you don’t want to swim. And so on. But it stands out in the microgym community because it draws a clear line between low-cost, access-only fitness facilities and coaching businesses.

The author and people reading the article—check it out here—likely think one thing is needed to get fit: facility access. So the entire article is about getting in at the cheapest rate.

More tips:

Read contracts so you know what you’re signing up for and don’t get locked in by accident.Consider “pay as you go” facilities.Wait for special offers and look for discounts.Use free trials.Consider working out at home.

Microgym owners who sell coaching will—or should—know that the people who appreciate this advice are not a good fit for their gyms.

Two-Brain data is clear:

Pay as you go is a disaster for cash flow and client adherence. Pay-as-you-go clients won’t “go” enough to actually become healthier. Special offers and discounts are bad for length of engagement. Long term, they actually kill gyms. For clients, discounts generally ensure they flutter from program to program and never develop the momentum that will help them reach their goals.Free trials are not the best way to get people into a gym. A consultation (No Sweat Intro) is far superior. Clients who book a consultation receive a clear, concise plan based on their goals. That helps them get results. Most people won’t work out at home because no one is providing accountability. It’s a poor option for most people. Need proof? Review local garage sales and note the fitness equipment for sale.

If anything, the article is confirmation that fitness businesses can be divided into two clear groups: Those that sell access and those that sell coaching. Both involve working out, but the difference is equivalent to renting someone a car vs. teaching them how to build a car.

The tough part is that consumers don’t know this. They think gyms are gyms are gyms. So they eat up articles that focus on pricing and discounts and get confused when microgym owners quote premium rates for coaching and tell them there are no discounts.

The lesson: Don’t ever assume people understand what you do.

When average people Google “gyms near me,” they’ll get access and coaching facilities in the search engine results pages. Google doesn’t know the difference between them, either. So you’ll need to draw the line for people. Be sure they can figure out exactly what you sell fast.

It’s up to you to educate potential clients for two reasons:

1. You want to avoid wasting time with people who are looking for $20 per month access-only memberships. They’re not your market if you run a coaching gym.

2. You want prospective clients to understand that coaching is far more valuable than access because people will actually get results with coaching.

Take a look at your media platforms now and ask a question:

Can a viewer tell that you sell coaching?

If not, make some changes to set your business apart!

The post “A Gym Is a Gym Is a—Why Do You Charge so Much?” appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Measure the Lives You’ve Changed

Chris Cooper (00:01):

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: You have some clients who’ve been with you for five years or more, and you have some clients who’ve been with you for one year or less, but you have very few people in the middle. My name’s Chris Cooper. And on today’s show, I’m gonna tell you why that is, what to do about it, and, more than anything else, why tracking this retention or “LEG” or “churn”—whatever you call it—is so critically important to your mission as a gym owner and to your business. If this episode helps you, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast channel so that we know that it’s important and we can keep making episodes like this to help you.

Chris Cooper (00:41):

So we talk about retention. We talk about LEG. We talk about churn. We talk about how to keep people longer, but here’s what makes this important: We are in the business, you and I, of changing lives. If somebody comes into your gym and leaves a month later, they have not changed their life. They have not had time to build the habits that they’ll keep forever or the foundational fitness knowledge that will help them get fit. At any age, they will not have had time to develop good technique, good posture. They will not know how to fix themselves when they go wrong. They will not have gained the perspective that only you can share after all of your years of experience as a coach. Too often, people quit too early. I was having this conversation with my GM and my head coach back in January.

Chris Cooper (01:34):

And we were talking about the Catalyst mission to enhance and extend the lives of 7,000 people in Sault Ste. Marie. And I said, “This is an awesome mission. How do we measure it?” Like, “How do we know when we’ve actually extended somebody’s life? How do we know when we’ve improved their life?” And we had this awesome discussion, and really what came up was people will tell us when their life has improved or there will be some meaningful event in their life that will tell us objectively that their life has improved. For example, maybe they run their first 5k or maybe they have met their spouse at the gym, or maybe they will just say “Catalyst changed my life.” And so I made this social-media post right after this meeting. And it was like, “Hey, here’s my gym. If you’ve been to my gym and it’s changed your life, let me know.”

Chris Cooper (02:23):

And 40 people sent us a message: “Catalyst has changed my life.” Here’s how we looked at those responses. We said, “What do these people have in common?” They had all been members for over three years. Even if they weren’t members now. They had all found a passion for fitness at Catalyst. Even if it wasn’t their first gym, it was the first gym that they liked. They had all found a sport through Catalyst, even if it wasn’t what we found. So some people found other cyclists at Catalyst, took up cycling, eventually moved outta the gym and that’s all they do now. But they found cycling through Catalyst. Some people got married, had kids because they met their spouse at Catalyst. And so when we looked at our clients, we determined that we are gonna declare our mission a success if the average client stays three years at Catalyst because these are the people who report that their lives have been changed through the development of habits, through proper movement technique.

Chris Cooper (03:23):

Even if it’s finding a different passion outside the gym, three years seems to be the most common point for those people whose lives we’ve changed. And so we made our target to have a LEG—length of engagement—of an average of three years. When most people, most gym owners come into our sales calls. They say, “I don’t really know what my LEG is because I’ve got some clients who’ve been with me for five years. And I’ve got a brand new batch of clients who only stay for seven or eight months.” And sometimes they’re embarrassed to even tell us that number. But the reality is that the industry average at a globo gym is about three months. And I’m not talking about membership because they sign a contract. So they’re paying for a year. I’m talking about adherence after March 17th. They stop coming. On average, less than 30 percent of the people who join Jan. 1 will still be there at the end of March—even in the microgym business, the CrossFit gyms, yoga studios, high-intensity interval training, boot camps.

Chris Cooper (04:26):

The industry average LEG is just under eight months. That means the average person shows up in January. And by August they’re gone. It’s just not enough time to change their life. So we’re gonna walk through an exercise today. I want you to think of a client who’s still with you. And they were there at the start. I’ve got a guy like this. His name is Chris. He’s literally been training with me for 20 years. I’ll get him on the podcast soon. But other gyms have clients who’ve been around for 10 years or five or three. They were one of the first clients to join and they’re still around. Think about their experience when they joined. What experience did they have? They probably got a lot of one-on-one attention from you. They probably got a lot of energy from you. They probably got a lot of direct coaching time from you or from your coaches.

Chris Cooper (05:24):

They probably formed a strong bond because they knew things about your life. And you knew things about their life. They probably felt important, like one of the founding members of this gym, and they probably felt a responsibility to carry on the brand and the culture, and to be an advocate for you. They probably took a little bit of ownership, even subconsciously, over your success. They wanted you to be successful because they were one of the first to invest their time, money and attention into you. The great news is that you can instill all of these things into your new clients. And so the reasons that the tactics that we teach to improve retention at Two-Brain work are because we think of the client experience. First, we build gyms that are “client centric.” Their model is built around what their clients want. Their methods are chosen to deliver their clients the best results.

Chris Cooper (06:23):

And it’s no surprise that the methods that I’m gonna share with you right now are what drive client retention. So the first thing is that every client needs a one-on-one onboarding program. Not because it’s what you charge more for. Not because it’s what you see Two-Brain espousing but because that is the best experience for the client. When a client comes in one on one and improves their movement and gets your undivided attention and gets your attention in between sessions and builds up the habits, you don’t have to worry about whether they like your group class or not. You don’t have to worry about them complaining about your programming. You don’t have to worry about them price shopping because they have received the attention that helps them invest in you as the coach. And so, yes, it does drive your average revenue per member up.

Chris Cooper (07:17):

It also increases your LEG—your length of engagement, but not just because it’s a parlor trick. Because this is giving the client the best possible onboarding to fitness, not just to your gym. Another reason that the on-ramp is so important is because if the client learns nothing from you, if they do quit after your four week on-ramp program, they will have gained enough knowledge and experience to train themselves for the rest of their life. I promise you whatever you’re teaching in those three or six or 12 one-on-one PT sessions is more than they will learn in the next 40 years from reading books, from attending seminars, from watching YouTube videos about fitness from their heroes, from playing sports, from anybody else. They will learn enough about fitness to take care of themselves for the rest of their life. Even if they don’t sign up with you after that, even if their friends are going to different gym, even if they decide “this is not for me,” they will have learned enough from you during your on-ramp phase to know what is right for them for the rest of their lives. And I hope that’s true for both exercise and nutrition.

Chris Cooper (08:25):

The next thing that really helps with retention is your goal review process. So you need to track whether the client is actually making progress or not. If all you’re doing is selling access, access to group classes, and you’re never asking the client their goals, and you’re never actually tracking if they’re achieving your goals, one of two things is true. Number one, they’re probably not achieving their goals. They’re achieving your goals. Number two, you’re scared to ask if they’re achieving their goals because you look around your gym and you see people who aren’t losing weight, people who are maybe getting injured, and you’re scared to find out whether your clients are making progress because that’s gonna make you ask some very serious questions about your coaching. I’ve been there. When I was a personal trainer, the first five years, I was not prescribing any nutrition coaching.

Chris Cooper (09:21):

So, you know, I’d be training somebody, especially women, they’d come in, they’d get really strong, they’d gain some confidence, and they would love the training. In two years down the track, they’d say, “Hey, when I signed up, I said, ‘I wanted to lose 30 pounds. I’m actually up three pounds.’” And now you’re trying to convince them to change their entire perspective on their body. And that is tough—worthwhile, but tough. It’s much better to actually get them results and change their perspective on their body so that they know that they’re happier and healthier and they’re gonna have a better lifespan. And healthspan. And so you need to track your clients’ progress individually. One way that CrossFit originally did that was to use named workouts. So you could see your progress. You could see your fitness improving if you did better at Fran or Murph or Grace or whatever. That’s pretty rare now. But even more important is tracking the metrics that your clients came to you to solve, to improve.

Chris Cooper (10:16):

And that means tracking body-fat percentage. It means tracking their weight. Because that’s what they care about. And if you really care about your clients, then you have to give them the results that they care about in return. And that’s what building a client-centric business is all about. And so goal reviews work because they’re an opportunity for you to change your client’s prescription. They’re an opportunity for you to have one-on-one conversations. They’re an opportunity for you, if your program isn’t working, to give them something different instead of them quitting and going out to find something completely different on their own. That’s what good coaching is. It’s not being right the first time, every time. It’s finding an alternative when you’re not right. Goal reviews also mean an opportunity for you to make your clients famous.

Chris Cooper (11:09):

If they’ve had some progress or they’re excited, you can put them on Facebook, which is like putting them on TV, and nobody else in their life can do that for them. Nobody else in their life can make them feel validated or tell them “you’re doing it right. You’re making progress. Way to go.” You can also grow your gym by saying to your clients “is there somebody else in your life that you’d really love to have with you at Catalyst?” Because most of the time your clients have a best friend or a spouse, and they wish happiness for that other person. They wanna share the happiness that they’ve found. And so they’re eager to say, “Yeah, if you can help me talk my husband into coming, you’ll be doing me a massive life service.” So that’s how goal reviews help. They give people opportunities to check in, to change course, to bring in friends, to be famous and also to stay longer.

Chris Cooper (12:00):

And when you’re doing these kind of meetups, which you probably did when your gym was small, that will help you increase your LEG and decrease your churn. Another great one is sending people notes. Now you can send them birthday cards. That’s kind of the tip of the iceberg. You can send them little, you know, little cards every time there’s a special occasion. “Congratulations!” You can take their picture in front of the PR board. You can put their name on the whiteboard. But these little points of communication between you and them—“Hey, Nick, woke up this morning. I was thinking about you. I’m so proud of you”—These will go further than any CRM automation, than any birthday-card service that you set up, than almost anything your CSM can do because it’s you and them. It’s a personal bridge. The more of these personal bridges you can set up, the stickier your net will be just because you’re thinking about them and thinking about their progress—even if it’s negative.

Chris Cooper (12:55):

“Hey, Nick, saw you in the gym yesterday and you looked kind of distracted and stressed. Man, how can I help?” Even that will bring a client back into the fold. Okay? So looking for opportunities to reach out and connect. And if you need help, do five of these a day before you do anything else. Send out five texts: thank-you text, what’s-up text, how’s-it-going-I’m-so-proud-of-you text. Doing that will also improve your retention. Now it’s no surprise that this is a tactic that works because when your gym was brand new, you probably did this. You spent more time talking to your clients. You checked in on them more. And as you grew from five clients to 150, that happened less and less and less.

Chris Cooper (13:41):

And that is why you have this gap between clients who’ve been with you for five years and clients who are with you for nine months and you have very few people in the middle. But what I wanna do is help you keep your clients for at least three years—long enough to change their life. We teach this process. We teach mapping the client journey in Two-Brain. We teach these three tactics that I’ve shared with you. Goal reviews, checkins and an on-ramp program. And we teach dozens of others. But they all come back to this: What would you do if you had only one client? If having one client was enough to pay you what you need to make, how would you treat that client? What would you do for them? What if you only had two clients, would that service change at all?

Chris Cooper (14:27):

What would you charge for it? How often would you be in touch and what services would you provide? Now, your job as a gym owner is not to figure out “how can I charge less and provide fitness programming for 150 instead of two?” Your job is to ask yourself, “How can I scale the level of service that I provided to one client to 250 clients?” That is what makes your gym scalable. It’s not the programming. It’s not the method. It’s not the tools. It’s the client relationship. Now I’m gonna do something here that my mentors have asked me to do that you might not want to hear: You need to track these metrics. You need to track your churn. You need to track your LEG, your length of engagement. These are two very different metrics. Churn is how many people quit your gym every month.

Chris Cooper (15:17):

That’s important to know from a financial standpoint. LEG is more important because LEG is a window into how effectively you’re changing lives. It’ll tell you how long you can plan for a client to stay. So if you know that you’ve got the average client for a year, how much value can you give them in that year? And that attempt will change their life. If you know that clients are only staying for six weeks, you know you’ve got a problem with your onboarding or your conversion. Tracking metrics will help your business. But more than anything else, you wanna know that your business is actually having an effect, that you’re achieving the mission. And so you need to track these metrics. Now, some software providers track these metrics. some track them wrong. Some use our definitions incorrectly. Some of them use different definitions of retention, but what you really need to do is this: the original LEF calculation came from Mindbody.

Chris Cooper (16:08):

And all you’ve gotta do is you look at your client list. You see for how many months has Client No. 1 been a member at your gym. They’ve been a member for 19 months. Great. Move on to the next client. “For how many months has Client B been a member at my gym?” seven months. Great. You put these in a spreadsheet. You total up how many months—total membership across all clients. Then  you have to divide by your number of members. And that’s your LEG. Piece of cake, but it takes a little bit of time. Our Two-Brain dashboard calculates this automatically based on a formula for you. So that you’ve got a really good approximation. You also want to know how long the average person is going to stay because our job is to serve them, right? It’s not to track business metrics.

Chris Cooper (16:54):

It’s not to think, “Oh three out of 150 isn’t bad.” It’s to think, “What’s going to happen to Mary? Where did John go? Why did Kim quit the gym?” That’s what tracking LEG is really all about. And while it’s a super-valuable business metric, more than anything, it’s a lives=changed metric. So when you get on a free call with our team, I want you to think hard about the actual length of engagement the average client has at your gym. I don’t want you to guess. I don’t want you to estimate. I don’t want you to think, “Oh, the average client stays for seven years and that’s great and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.” I want you to think, “Am I changing their lives?” And measuring LEG is one way to tell. Hope this helps.

Announcer (17:37):

That was Chris Cooper on Two-Brain Radio. Hit subscribe, then check out this final message.

Chris Cooper (17:42):

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 How to Measure the Lives You’ve Changed appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Stop Making Mistakes as a Gym Owner

Chris Cooper: (00:01)

I wish entrepreneurs never screwed up, but they invariably do. And this week I’m gonna tell you exactly what to do when you make a big mistake. My name’s Chris Cooper, I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. And if this podcast is helpful to you, please give us a five star review on whatever platform you’re listening on. This tells us exactly what to keep producing content on by letting us know what’s most helpful. And that’s what we wanna do. This week, we’re talking about how you get over some of the biggest mistakes that gym owners make. And I’m gonna reference some blog posts from some of our certified Two-Brain Business mentors who have been where you are and they’ve made crazy mistakes. And here’s how they’ve gotten over them. We’re gonna start with a list of things that Kenny Markwardt, who’s a certified Two-Brain Business mentor, has done at his gym.

Chris Cooper: (00:48)

He writes, “I’ve made people do burpees for every minute they were late to class. I’ve had multiple people get rhabdo. I’ve gotten in public arguments online. I’ve gone on wild rants on our public Facebook page. I’ve charged $80 a month for memberships. I’ve had mass exoduses of members who are upset with changes. I’ve had people tell me that I’m an a-hole. I’ve had people write negative reviews. I’ve had people write long detailed emails about why my gym sucks, and I’ve told people to F off. And yet here I am owning and operating a very successful micro gym. The point is that no matter what you’ve messed up or are currently messing up, it’s all repairable. And none of it is worth losing a ton of sleepover.” And yes, as Kenny writes, I’ve also lost an ungodly amount of sleep. So first you’re gonna prepare to fail.

Chris Cooper: (01:43)

And then you’re going to succeed. As a gym owner, you’re undoubtedly going to make mistakes, many, many mistakes. It’s unavoidable. In fact, I’d say that if you don’t think you’re making any mistakes, or if you think that you haven’t made any mistakes, you’re either completely oblivious or you’re just setting yourself up for some colossal failure in the future. So when you’ve realized that you’ve made a mistake, instead of lamenting what you’ve done or what you could have done differently, here is what to do. Number one, admit when you’re wrong and make it right according to your mission, vision, and values. You have to be careful here because it’s easy to fall on your sword and profusely apologize for things that don’t deserve that much weight. Most of the time, it’s better to just make a change quietly, make a quick apology when necessary and move on, letting your action speak for themselves.

Chris Cooper: (02:36)

The people that you want in your gym will be cool and won’t rub your noses in your mistake. Second, turn your mistake into a great story that you can tell in the future. “All of my errors on the list above are pretty funny to me now,” writes Kenny. “Am I proud of them? Not really, but as the current owner of a gym that’s consistently on Two-Brain’s leaderboards every month, I can say confidently that I find those flaws of an immature gym owner amusing, and part of the process of growing into a better entrepreneur.” The third tip from Kenny is to learn from your mistakes and use them to refine your business, your processes, and your decision making. At the time I made many of the mistakes I listed above, I thought that I wanted to run this hardcore athletes-only gym. I thought I wanted a gym where you would take off your shirt

Chris Cooper: (03:25)

when you came in the door, chalk the F up and crank Rage against the Machine as loud as humanly possible so that you could make sure you would crush your previous Fran time. It turns out that vision wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. By refining my vision, I was able to make clearer decisions in the future. The fourth tip from Kenny is to help your staff develop by explaining what happened, why you’re correcting your course and what you hope to do in the future. The best gifts that we can give our teams are clarity and an understanding of the why behind our decisions. This info will help them make their own decisions according to your vision when challenges arise. And the fifth tip from Kenny is talk to your mentor. They’ll help you talk through it and figure out exactly what to do next.

Chris Cooper: (04:12)

They’ll also probably regale you with all the screwups that they’ve had over the years. It’ll be good to get everything off your chest, to know that you aren’t alone and to know exactly how to move forward. So next time you mess up, don’t panic. It happens to all of us. In fact, I can almost guarantee I know someone who has messed up a similar situation much worse than you have, but came out better on the other side. And you’ll fare the same. If you follow the steps from Kenny above, remember that if you’re planning on owning your gym for the next 20 or 30 years, anything that you do now is just a small blip in the lifespan of your business. Most of us cringe at the stuff we did as people 10 years ago. We were younger and dumber and the same goes for our gym.

Chris Cooper: (04:57)

Errors might sting a little bit now, but I promise your success will bury your mistakes in the long run as long as you can survive them. Now, I wanna talk about friend employees. You know who, I mean, they’re your buddies and that’s why you hired them to be the GM. Or maybe they were a great coach, and now you’ve put them into a different role and they are failing. You hired them and now you have to manage them. This is from Amber Cooper, my sister, who is the COO at Two-Brain Business and has run some huge companies as COO. She’s also a masters in human resources and has seen a lot of this after working with unions for nearly a decade. So Amber writes, “I was recently talking to the chief operations officer of a growing company about the biggest challenge in their business.

Chris Cooper: (05:46)

And here’s what they said. They said, ‘we have all these original team members who aren’t doing the job that we need done anymore. And the CEO won’t address the issues because he hired all his friends.'” Does that sound familiar to you? This situation is common in gyms. Often, coaches and other staff members are hired from your inner circle of friends, acquaintances, and your clients. You know them, you like them. They’re available, you’re hired. And I’ve done this myself at the time. I saw the upside and I didn’t think through what could go wrong, but in the end, my friend didn’t like the job or the structure of the company. So I felt guilty and pulled in two directions. On one side, I wanted to support my friend. And on the other side, I needed to support the company into which I had brought someone who wasn’t a good fit anymore.

Chris Cooper: (06:35)

So though friendship and business can go together at times, entrepreneurs who bring in a friend without following a hiring process can grow to have regrets and feel handcuffed to that person. Maybe the job just needs someone with more capability now that your company is grown, or maybe you’re avoiding dealing with your friend on performance issues because you don’t wanna have that uncomfortable conversation. Or maybe you’ve realized that your friend is a great person to hang out with on the weekend, but their work ethic and commitment to your business aren’t up to the standards you’ve set for the others on your team. So what now? Well, if you’re in this situation, Amber says there are several things that you can do now to preserve the relationship and set the company and your personal relationship up for success. So first professionalize your work relationship, whether your friend is just starting out or they’ve been with you a while, it’s time to set the ground rules, tell them you want to hit the reset button.

Chris Cooper: (07:34)

You didn’t make your expectations clear from the start. And you’d like to do that. Now talk about boundaries and expectations, including your leadership style and what it’s like to work for you, your work life and your personal life and how you’d like to keep them separate. The deal breakers, for example, poor work ethic is an okay. Speaking negatively about clients is an automatic goodbye, et cetera. And finally how you will handle it if you have to provide feedback on something. Be sure to check in with them, to see if there are any areas they’re worried about in this relationship. Like ask them, do you think this relationship will continue to work for you now that you know these things about me and how I run my company? The second step after you’ve done a reset, is to create an eject button. So come to an agreement with your friend on how you can part ways if you need to, and you can ensure that they can say, “that’s it I’m done” with no hard feelings.

Chris Cooper: (08:33)

It’s really hard to stick to this one. But some short-term discomfort due to the eject button is better than allowing resentment to build and permanently destroying the relationship. Amber says the third step is to hold them to the standards of the job. Now this might seem obvious, but we can get stuck in this trap of making more allowances for our friends. This creates a bigger issue and it can ruin your relationship. You just let things go and let things go until finally, you can’t let it go anymore. And it just blows up. So it’s better to talk to your friend early and often about issues as they arise. And the bonus is that doing so will mitigate the perception of favoritism among your other team members. Strong friendships can make your workplace an awesome place to be, but setting the right tone from the start can help prevent situations where a new work dynamic creates conflict at your workplace, and also ruins the friendship.

Chris Cooper: (09:29)

Now, I wanna talk to you about another big mistake that gym owners make, which is backsliding. Hiring somebody to do a job, and then just micromanaging them or working backward and doing the job for them and paying them anyway. And these are also tips from Kenny Markwardt, certified Two-Brain Business mentor. Kenny writes, “Have you ever spent an entire Sunday cleaning your house? At the end of the day, everything is organized and labeled and the laundry is all done. And your house actually resembles a place you would invite the public into and you vow, like, I’m never letting it go backward. You might even hold a family meeting to say, this can never happen again. Here’s where all your stuff goes now. And that’s where it shall live forever, no excuses. And less than a week later, you’re embarrassed and angry because all the work was quickly undone. In case you didn’t know it,

Chris Cooper: (10:22)

that’s the reality for all of us and business ownership is no different. If you’ve gone through our Ramp Up program or you’ve dedicated yourself to working on your business for any period of time, you’ve done a substantial amount of house cleaning, and it’s a lot of work, but after you’re finished, you think to yourself, this is fantastic. I’ll never go back to frantically running a gym like a house on fire again. And sure enough, six months later, you slid backwards because old habits are hard to break. So those three month client contracts never got renewed. And your coach evaluation meetings were amazing in the first round and second round, but then you didn’t schedule a third round and your goal reviews were a huge hit. But this quarter you’ve only done three of them and people are abusing your kindhearted nature with regard to your cancellation policy.

Chris Cooper: (11:11)

And you might have even backed down and given somebody a discount. I’m here to tell you this is normal. We’re all guilty of backsliding. Maybe it’s taken you three or five or 10 years to develop your entrepreneurial habits. And then after six months, it’s easy to go back to them. We’re all guilty of this. And it’s only a failure if you don’t address it. So here’s what to do first. Tell your mentor that you’ve slid backward in your habits. Don’t be embarrassed. We know that it happens. In fact, it happens to us too. It’s easy to think everyone else is running perfect gyms and you are the only one with skeletons in the closet, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. So just be open with your mentor, send an email right now and say, Hey, Hey, I’ve slid backward a bit with my marketing or my sales or my ops.

Chris Cooper: (11:58)

I need some help getting back on track. And they’re happy to give you a plan. Second, go through your Growth Toolkit milestones, starting from the very beginning. Yeah. Like start with the fundamentals. Most of us think, oh we did the things that we were supposed to do when they were assigned by our mentor. But then we forgot to keep doing them. By going through the things that you’ve already done, you’ll find all the important things that have been neglected or were never really fully, completely done in the first place. And again, don’t be embarrassed. This is normal. When you’re going through our program, you’ll often get really excited about the next thing that we’re teaching you and maybe forget to repeat the thing that you just did. Third: build in systems to prevent you from messing up in the future. Most of us went through Ramp Up and implemented things that were supposed to be done quarterly, like goal reviews and staff evaluations and career growth sessions.

Chris Cooper: (12:54)

But if you’re like most people, those things eventually faded away. And this usually happens because an owner said the tasks were going to be done quarterly, but never scheduled themselves to follow up every quarter. So put your tasks on the calendar. Book them ahead. Even if three months seems like an eternity from now, with the task on the schedule, you’ll have built in accountability. And if your schedule changes over time, the task will still be there as a reminder. And you can reschedule it if you have to, or even delegate it, but put the important tasks on the planner and you won’t slide backward.” Follow this plan with everything, make sure that you’re repeating the stuff. Nothing that we teach is one and done. You’re always going to have periods of greatness in terms of progress. You’re also always going to have times when you’re sliding backward a bit. By taking the steps that Kenny just outlined,

Chris Cooper: (13:44)

you’ll slide backward a little less each time and a few years from now you’ll be much, much further ahead. So today, now finally, I want to talk about managing risk and the cost of failure. And this is a huge mistake that we see a lot of gym owners make. And this is from a blog post from Colm O’Reilly, a certified Two-Brain Business mentor from Ireland. And Colm is a super duper funny guy. If you’ve ever been to a Two-Brain Summit where Colm has presented or seen him on YouTube or listened to a podcast, you’ll know he makes a lot of jokes. And as Colm writes, it might be hard to believe, but most of his jokes fall flat. “in fact, if I get 30% of them to elicit a chuckle or a groan, I would consider them a success” and I’m quoting him here.

Chris Cooper: (14:35)

“But my misses don’t matter because the cost of failure is pretty low when you’re telling a bad joke. For example, comedians Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld do small shows for months to refine their jokes and routines until they’re ready to do a big tour. So what does this have to do with business? Well, there are two important points. Number one, business is a constant stream of iterations. And number two, we need to manage the cost of failure in business. We’re never going to reach a stage where everything just runs perfectly forever without us. We’ll need to adapt to changing circumstances, hello COVID, or slightly improve in an important area. The key is knowing what to focus on, determining how much work will be required, defining what success looks like and laying out the conditions for canceling the mission or rolling it back.” In other words, we have to know when to stop doing something that’s no longer working. Colm says, “it’s tempting to want to launch a new service like nutrition or a kids program.

Chris Cooper: (15:37)

And just imagine all the extra revenue that will roll in. And it’s vital that we investigate what work is going to be required to get that program running, how much time and money it will cost and how long it will take to see a return. We also need to ask a key question. Can you afford all of this right now?” Now, none of this is intended to deter you from trying new things. In fact, you need to try new things constantly. You can’t just keep doing the same old, same old. If you stagnate, it’ll be too late to try new things and you won’t have the skill of adapting and iterating. Colm simply wants to protect you from disappointment and the feeling of failure upfront by getting you to plan your actions. So Colm says that in his business, we could launch secondary revenue streams like nutrition, kids, mindset coaching, because we could afford the time and capital expenditure to nurture these programs, because his primary revenue stream supported the work.

Chris Cooper: (16:33)

He could also review all of his programs to ensure the time invested is still giving them a return and they’re prepared to refocus their energies based on those reviews. What’s just as important as starting new things is knowing and understanding the cost of failure if something doesn’t work out. Coca-Cola reportedly lost 34 million on new Coke, but they survived the disaster. And as a small business owner, you wanna avoid disasters completely and minimize the cost of failure if you possibly can. For example, launching a weightlifting program might cost you up to, you know, $10,000 in new bars and bumps and platforms. It could take a long time to recoup that money, and you might not do it if the program flops like a bad joke. A nutrition certification at $1,500 is a much lower sum cost, but some now cost up to $10,000 and you need to set up a program launch in advance to make sure that you’re going to make that money back.

Chris Cooper: (17:32)

And at Two-Brain, of course, we tell clients exactly how to do this, to give it the best chance of success. So which program would carry fewer risks and offer greater potential benefits for your business. When you’re planning any changes or expansions, you need to work with your mentor to determine what’s worth it right now, when you should wait, what failure would actually cost you and how you will recover if things don’t work out or how you’ll capitalize if they do. What that really means is you need to have a plan. You need to say, not just, I need to buy five new rowers, but how will these rowers generate a return? Because you always have other places that you can put your money. And when you’re auditing any expense, you need to have a clear path to making a return on all of your investments, equipment, staff, rental space, branding, affiliation, licensing, mentorship, of course, your software, et cetera. Before you buy anything new, just have a plan in place to make that investment back at least two and a half times over. So I’ve been talking about avoiding and correcting mistakes. It’s normal for you to make mistakes. We all do. But it’s not normal to keep repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result. Hopefully this has helped you learn to plan things out in advance to recover from mistakes, and also to have the mindset that it is possible to recover from mistakes.

Mike Warkentin: (19:00)

Don’t make a big mistake here. Subscribe for more shows just like this. Now here’s Chris one more time.

Chris Cooper: (19:06)

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. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.

The post How to Stop Making Mistakes as a Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Top 7 Things You Need to Stop Doing at Your Gym

I wish I’d had this list in 2010.

It would have saved me a ton of stress and money.

I hope it will help you.

A quick note: This is my Top 7 based on my experience–not “The Official Two-Brain Top 7.” That doesn’t exist.

Two-Brain mentors analyze each gym, find the biggest issues and recommend changes that have a huge effect on that business. They prescribe the right thing at the right time for each individual gym owner. The exact to-do list looks different for every entrepreneur we work with.

But the mistakes below are very common, so here we go.

Don’t do this stuff!

1. Only Running Group Classes

It seems obvious now, but it wasn’t when opened my gym. I didn’t realize group classes were my “discount revenue stream.” Personal coaching is actually the premium revenue stream, and adding it when I opened my gym probably would have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next decade.

Read More: “Group Traning IS Your Discounted Option”

2. Trying to Get Every Client

I remember the feeling of dread when I considered “firing” certain problem clients. I could have saved many hours if I had just told some people “we don’t offer what you want” when they inquired about joining the gym. But I was desperate for clients, so I accepted competitors who only wanted open gym, jerks who didn’t want to be coached, people who didn’t want to pay my rates, and so on. If I had screened my clients better on the way in and only taken those who fit the business, everyone would have been happier—owners, staff and other clients.

Read More: “Why We Don’t Take Every Client—and Neither Should You”

3. Focusing on Competition (on Anything Your Ideal Clients Don’t Care About)

You can definitely run a gym with a mission of helping competitive athletes find success. But if that’s not your mission, an “accidental” competition focus can really damage a gym that was set up to help average people accomplish health and fitness goals. I definitely fell into this trap. If your best clients don’t care about throwdowns and leaderboards, don’t invest huge amounts of resources on them. Always focus on giving your best clients what they want. That advice is sound whether you’re talking about competition, group coaching, recovery rooms, spin classes, yoga programs or anything else. Don’t find clients for your business. Build the business around your best clients, then find more people just like them.

Watch:

4. Putting Marketing Before Retention

Don’t pour water into a bucket with holes in it. End of story.

Listen: “Retention: What Actually Matters (and What Doesn’t)”

5. Putting Staff Development Before Business Development

I thought great coaches would make me profitable. That didn’t happen. Great business practices make gyms profitable. The best coach in the world will go hungry if clients don’t pay their fees on time—but so many gym owners forget about that. Put business systems in place first so great coaches can succeed in your gym. Don’t put great coaches into a plane that’s headed toward the mountain.

Listen: “Developing Coaches Won’t Grow Your Business”

6. Buying too Much Stuff

Whenever I hear a gym owner ask about “turf options” in a gym, I get nervous. Turf is expensive and underused in most facilities. But it looks cool, and it makes you fee like a professional strength and conditioning coach. Let’s be real: Most clients don’t need turf to be successful. If you’re training college football players for the NFL Combine, you might need turf. If you’re trying to help the average person lose weight, you don’t need turf. Apply this mentality to every purchase and ask, “What do my clients actually need to get results?” Then buy only that stuff.

Read More: “What Gyms Really Need: Space and Equipment”

7. Ignoring Systems

Systems are tedious. I get it. But every single strong business has them. The mom-and-pop shop that teeters on the brink of bankruptcy? It doesn’t have systems. I’ll give you a single example that should make the point: “I don’t need your credit card number today. Just chuck a check at me later this month.” That should make your stomach churn. When it comes to any aspect of your business, always answer these two questions for yourself: “What’s the best way to do this?” and “How do I make sure it’s done that way every time?”

Read More: “Gym Business Systems: How to Survive a Bus Crash”

Bonus Tip

You can fix all this stuff on your own, but you probably won’t. I say that because I couldn’t do it. I needed the help of a mentor who provided insight, prioritization and accountability. If you’re struggling to make changes to your business, here’s a bonus tip:

Don’t try to do everything on your own. If you’re struggling, call for backup.

The post The Top 7 Things You Need to Stop Doing at Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Building the Next Level When Your Gym is Finally Successful

Chris Cooper: (00:02)

You are making some money. Good. Finally. You’re not scared of shutdowns and lockdowns anymore. Good. You have decent retention or a solid client headcount. Good. In fact, if you’ve read “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief,” you recognize that you’re leaving Farmer Phase and entering Tinker Phase. That’s awesome. So what’s next for you? Well, that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. My name is Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business and the author of “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” as well as several books on growing your gym. And today I’m gonna talk about what happens when you have a successful gym business and what you want to do next. If you find this is helpful to you, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and give us a five star review so that I know there are people out there listening who are at this level.

Chris Cooper: (00:50)

So let’s get going here. When you have a successful gym business, it’s easy to look around and feel alone because very few micro gym owners actually make it to this point. And though that number is growing, thanks to things like our growth mentorship practice, very few models exist to help gym owners to scale beyond their current gyms. So what do you wanna do? Do you wanna open a second location? Do you wanna buy out your competitor? Do you wanna double the size of your gym? Do you wanna sell a new service to your existing audience? Do you wanna buy your building or another building? Do you wanna just buy Bitcoin or a rental property? There are dozens of options available to you. And in this podcast episode today, I’m gonna talk to you about the next steps in your entrepreneurial journey. Because if I know you, and I think I do, I know you’re not done yet because you are an entrepreneur now and entrepreneurs build.

Chris Cooper: (01:47)

So let’s get started. The biggest mistake that gym owners make when they’re reaching this point and their first gym is fairly successful, and they’re thinking about maybe buying another gym or opening a second location, is they don’t actually test how resilient their first location is. They’re not absolutely certain that their first gym can run without them. Because whatever your next project is, it’s going to require a lot of your time and attention. And if you don’t test whether your existing gym can run without you, you’ll probably take a few steps to get started on your next project, and then get sucked back into your gym. So before you start building any of these options, I want you to do me a favor, and that is take a five-day vacation. I want you to go away from your gym. I want you to have no contact whatsoever.

Chris Cooper: (02:35)

And then when you come back, you’re gonna audit how things went. Did new clients walking in the door get sold on your service? Did your marketing work? Did anything break? Did the toilet paper get refilled? Audit everything. And Two-Brain clients, you have something that are called the six audits available to you in the growth toolkit so that you can see which cracks you have to patch before you’re actually ready to move on to the next strategy. The biggest mistake that gym owners can make is they think that their current strategy is gonna be a winner forever, right? Like I’ve had a couple of wins. I did this Facebook ad campaign with this 90-day challenge and I signed up 30 people. I’m a success. I know what to do. Check. Let’s go. But the key to long term success as an entrepreneur isn’t just constant forward motion, because that’s just never the case.

Chris Cooper: (03:27)

The key is actually stopping backward motion. You wanna go forward and then not slip backward. All business is cyclical to an extent. Sometimes you’ll grow. Sometimes you’ll shrink. The key is to grow as much as possible when you’re in a growth phase and minimize shrinkage when you aren’t. Two steps forward, one step back. That’s how you feel when you’re starting out. But eventually we wanna feel like you’re having three steps forward and then one step back, and then five steps forward and one step back, and then 10 steps forward and a tiny step back. And over time you wanna feel like you’re making more and more momentum in between those little setbacks and maybe the setbacks get smaller too. For example, it was pretty hard to grow during COVID shutdowns. So we had gym owners focus on minimizing shrinkage. They cut costs. They renegotiated their rent.

Chris Cooper: (04:21)

They kept as many clients as possible by adjusting their services and focusing on retention. And when their gyms reopened, they were ready for growth. And the average gym saw an immediate surge of 8% revenue or more. Most entrepreneurs, especially in the fitness industry, can find a bit of success pretty easily every few years or so. Some great idea emerges that can get you some new clients fast. And we’ve reported on a lot of them on our blog. Like if I go way back, the New You challenge, and then there was Check-ins for Charity. And then there were six-week challenges, like whole lifestyle changes and stuff like that. And new ones are always appearing. Last year, it was high-ticket coaching. And most of these ideas work for a while. The key is to take the progress you make and keep it instead of slipping backward.

Chris Cooper: (05:10)

But many gym owners start running one of these promotions, they see a quick win and they become over confident in the long term viability of that strategy. And some gyms, unfortunately, they go all in on that strategy. And then when it stops working, it kills their gym. So here’s how to stop sliding backward. Number one is to reinvest your wins. Why do the most successful entrepreneurs in the world have mentors? Because they’re always looking for the next level. They wanna talk with people who have been there already. Number two, watch your data. The first time you use a new marketing strategy, record everything that you can. Your set rate, your show rate, your close rate, your conversion rate, and your length of engagement for the new members that you’re gaining. Now, the second time you use the strategy, you compare your numbers. Are you getting fewer leads?

Chris Cooper: (06:05)

Are the leads getting colder? Are you paying more to acquire a client? Is the quality of the client going down? Is your retention dropping? If any of these numbers are decreasing, then you are using a short-term strategy. Use it while it works, but be ready to replace it when it stops. Third, press the “save game” button. Anybody brought up in the video-game era knows what I’m talking about here. Capture this moment of success in time, record all of your SOPs, all of your prices, get it all on paper. Replace yourself with an operations manual, make your business turnkey. In times of crisis, we fall to the level of our preparation. Get your business out of your head. And it’s like pressing save game on your gym because you’re recording a snapshot of exactly how things were done when you were at your best.

Chris Cooper: (06:59)

Number four: if you’re ready, hire a manager. You need somebody else to oversee your daily gym operations so that you are free to build the next phase. You can’t open a second location if you’re still coaching classes or scheduling appointments at your first location. Number five: don’t let yourself repeat mistakes. Your manager is going to make a few mistakes and that’s okay, as long as the manager doesn’t repeat them. Audit your processes and your plans at least every six months. Record what’s worked since the last time you wrote your playbook and what didn’t work. When somebody screws up, including you, document the error, just so it’s not repeated. You’re allowed to make mistakes, but you’re not allowed to repeat them. Number six, if you’re ready to move up, you need to start mentoring your staff. It took you years of mistakes and books, and probably mentorship to grow to this stage.

Chris Cooper: (07:55)

All of that experience and knowledge doesn’t automatically pass to the next person in line. If you don’t mentor people, you will be pulled back into gym problems over and over again. Number seven, you need to make yourself antifragile. You need to adopt systems that will allow you to pivot in the event of another business closure or a recession. Keep your online programs ready, move to a prescriptive model, and make sure nutrition coaching is a big part of your service. Number eight. Finally, you’ll need to keep your hands outta the machine. I’m a product guy. So I get it. It’s very tempting and easy to keep tweaking your training product, micromanaging your staff, finding yourself, you need to upgrade your coaches, finding mistakes in your SOPs and fixing them. This is the triage trap of business, and it stops you from growing. You can’t drive the car with the hood open.

Chris Cooper: (08:50)

Now, if you follow these steps, you will stop the “two steps forward, two steps back” dance that prevents most entrepreneurs from succeeding at a higher level. And instead you’ll create a ratchet effect of forward progress long-term. So now let’s talk about building the next step using the leverage that you have. You actually have three points of leverage. These are what I would call assets. They are your audience, your cash, and your time. First, you want to look for activities that generate cash with the least possible effort. You don’t really wanna start from scratch with a brand new idea. Leverage the assets that you have by leveraging your audience or your cash currently at your disposal. And I want you to start with these two instead of trying to leverage your time, because many entrepreneurs are tempted to start from scratch with this brand new idea.

Chris Cooper: (09:48)

And they pull themselves all the way back into Founder phase and their time becomes worth four bucks an hour again. And you’ll see what I mean as I go through this, but start with your audience. So to leverage your existing audience, which is your greatest asset: number one, you can help people solve a larger problem or a different problem. If everybody at your gym also needs nutrition help, then you should launch a nutrition business. This is a tiny example. A larger one might be childcare or health insurance or coffee. Solve the problem that the greatest number of people in your gym already have. Number two, look for the option that requires the least amount of your time. So for example, adding a rentable asset, like a float tank or an infrared sauna, requires investment, but no time. You just set it up and charge for its use.

Chris Cooper: (10:40)

Conversely, a coffee bar or a smoothie bar requires a lot of your time for a very, very, very small return and a lot of risk. Number three, you could help somebody from your team open a second location. Think how easy it would be for you to go out and open a second gym, knowing what you know now. Well, if you have somebody on your team who legitimately wants to be an entrepreneur, then you can be their investor. You can license your brand and you can mentor the person. You can share your SOPs, your intellectual property, maybe even your brand, if they don’t want to create their own. But all the stuff that you’ve learned and implemented and tested and trialed and is successful is tremendously valuable. The fourth option is to invest in a client who wants to open a business. You have to be very careful with this one because the client probably doesn’t see the hard parts of entrepreneurship.

Chris Cooper: (11:33)

And if the venture fails, you’re going to lose a client and a friend. I’ve had to learn this lesson many times, and it’s been very painful every single time, but it is an option. And sometimes this does come up in your audience. For example, I know several gyms who have started booking and billing software with a member of their gym who was an app developer, and they’ve made a bit of money on it. Or I know other gym owners who have started supplement companies because they have somebody in their gym who is in fact good at figuring out beverages and canning and supply chains. I know one gym owner who recently bought out a local sign shop from a member, or he bought a share of it. And he is just coaching them to help grow their sign business.

Chris Cooper: (12:19)

Right? There are opportunities out there, they’re just rare and they’re risky. Your second asset is cash. Now, to leverage your cash, which is your second best asset. First: you can invest in long term cash flow, like buying buildings and renting them to other people instead of flipping them. Now, these could be commercial buildings for your business or for other businesses, or it could be rental properties like Airbnbs or self-storage units. And your other option is to invest in other people’s businesses, through the stock market or other mutual funds or angel investing or whatever. Obviously that’s a little bit riskier, but you can do it. And a lot of people in our Tinker program do. Now your third greatest asset is time. To maximally leverage it, start by calculating your effective hourly rate. So divide the hours that you work in a month into your net owner benefit, which is what you paid by all of your businesses.

Chris Cooper: (13:17)

So for Two-Brain clients, you can work through this exercise step-by-step in the Value Ladder workbook on the growth toolkit. Then step two is to buy yourself time. Hire someone to replace you in the lowest value role that you’re currently filling. Third, you can set up a 90-day sprint to work solely on the higher value role. So for example, how many new clients could you gain in 90 days if that was your only job? Fourth, stay focused on that new project until it can run without you. And then fifth: leave deep tracks so a staff person can trail. Now I wanna talk about our Tinker program. Our Tinker program is for entrepreneurs who’ve made their first business successful, or successful enough that they have a little bit of spare time and a little bit of spare money. And they’re thinking about the next phase of their ascension as an entrepreneur. They want to go from incremental gain one client at a time, $200 a month at a time to exponential gain by investing their time, their money or their audience slightly differently.

Chris Cooper: (14:19)

And so in our Tinker program, we bring in speakers to help you optimize your time, teach you how to lead better, help you mentor your team, build cashflow assets, duplicate your first business and serve more people. We work in groups with other high-level entrepreneurs who are at the same stage. And some of these people are at the multi-million-dollar mark already. We meet in person, we meet online and we travel together to do interesting stuff. You have levers that can produce growth. They are your audience, your money and your time. But the fulcrum on which all of these levers pivot is people. You have to be around the right people. You have to follow the right people. I mean, receiving mentorship, not just reading your books, and you have to become the right person. In Tinker phase, knowledge is not enough. You must immerse yourself in success, be around successful people

Chris Cooper: (15:13)
if you’re going to grow further. On that note, I want to close with how to level up your staff and fire them up instead of firing them. Because if you want to climb higher, you have to assemble a better team. You’ve done the hard work, the labor of leadership, right? You’ve taken your big risks. You’ve missed paychecks. You’ve read a book every two weeks for the last five years. You’ve been at work before the sun rose and after the sun set too many times to count. But your staff haven’t. You have fired clients. You have fired your friends. You’ve interviewed people and you’ve said no to really good ideas and opportunities. You have set your rates and you stuck by them, even when people got angry about them. You wrote a staff playbook and you made rules for a reason, and then you enforce them. But your staff haven’t.

Chris Cooper: (16:03)

When you hire people to replace you in any role in your business, you have to remember that they’re beginners. They will learn faster than you did because you’ll teach them, but they still have to learn those lessons. This is a very hard lesson to remember, but if you fail to leave deep tracks for your staff to follow, you will always be their micromanaging supervisor. They won’t like it. And neither will you. So here’s how to mentor your staff to grow your business without you being there. Number one, give them a paint by numbers picture, not a blank canvas. It’s not their job to reinvent everything. It is not their job to figure out how to get new clients. You have already figured that out. And so you give them a staff playbook, you set their operating procedures, “do it like this,” you give them a sales binder with your pricing, you give them a dress code. In other words, you give them guidelines. Second, you give them a north star. You write out your mission for the gym. When your staff encounter a new challenge for which there is no map, no SOP, they can look at this north star and say, here’s what the owner would do. Now, you’ve got a point A: your standard operating procedures, and a point B: your mission, where you wanna go. And your job is to mentor them to get from point A to point B. So here are the steps. Number one: teach. Here is why we do it this way. Number two: isolate problems. Dig deep and get to the root of each barrier to your growth. Number three: ask your staff how they would solve the problem. Ask them to give you three alternatives. If all three are different from your way, then gently steer them toward the right answer, but make sure you’re encouraging them enough to make suggestions next time.

Chris Cooper: (17:50)

Number four: role-play the solution if it’s a people problem, and it’s almost always a people problem. Number five: give them a deadline and ask for a report. Number six: run through an after action report. So if they solve the problem, record the solution in your playbook for next time. If they didn’t solve the problem, then teach them how it could have been approached better. Now, mentorship isn’t all about solving problems. It’s really about creating personal growth and helping them level up too. But it almost always starts with solving some current problems. Eventually every good mentor moves clients from fighting fires to feeling like they’re on fire. So here’s how to light the match. First to your staff, if they’re high level, issue one growth challenge. For example, say, “I want you to get five clients in August.” Second, give them solutions. Ask your staff for three ways they think they could get five clients in August. Then third: role-play the solution if it’s a people solution, right? So well, here’s exactly what we would say. Here’s what we would do if we’re asking for referrals. And then fourth, give them the tools they need to be successful and a deadline as well as a clear metric. So five clients is a great metric. “Grow my gym” is a bad metric. And five, create an after action report. If the strategy worked, celebrate, then record the solution in your playbook and plan to repeat it monthly, quarterly, or annually. Put it on your calendar to start slowly building a plan for growth. Now, mentoring your staff is a lot like mentoring gym owners. You have to start with triaging problems and putting out fires before you can get them to feel like they’re on fire. But as they gain confidence, you should quickly move to growth strategies.

Chris Cooper: (19:34)

You should gather little wins together. You should set clear targets. You should hold them accountable and you should celebrate wins every time you meet as well as recording their lessons. And then you just watch your metrics improve. Reaching the Tinker Phase, the level where your first business is running well and you’ve got a little bit of time and a little bit of money, it requires delegation, but it doesn’t require abdication. Your gym still exists. Someone else can run it pretty autonomously, but only with mentorship. The GM of my gym has a Two-Brain mentor that’s not me. My staff is in the Two-Brain team training program. They all have mentors because when they grow, so does my gym. If you want to serve as the mentor for your GM, that’s great, but you can’t just abdicate responsibility to them and hope that your gym will continue to grow without you.

Chris Cooper: (20:25)

I hope this helps. You really can reach the next level. There are examples, about 60 of them, of people in the Two-Brain Tinker program who are doing amazing things in a variety of different ways. We’ve certified over 25 millionaires so far this year. And as these people continue to push the envelope, they set amazing examples for the rest of us. And this is really what’s helping Two-Brain have such a massive impact right now is this tip of the spear. The people who are already successful, collaborating, sharing, wins and growing faster together than they could on their own.

Mike Warkentin: (21:03)

That was Chris Cooper. And this is Two-Brain Radio. Please subscribe for more episodes. Now here’s Chris with a special message.

Chris Cooper: (21:10)

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. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.

The post Building the Next Level When Your Gym is Finally Successful appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

You Post No Fire Emojis: Developing Social-Media Discipline

Many gym owners don’t have “media discipline.”

And that’s a big problem.

But it’s easily solvable.

This week on Two-Brain Radio, Chris Cooper talked about how discipline creates freedom for an entrepreneur.

Short summary: Your business is your systems—the standard operating procedures that ensure consistency and excellence.

When it comes to media, very few gym owners have any systems. They just post something when they have time, which isn’t often, and they struggle to grow their audience through conversations in media.

The fix is easy: Put media posting on your schedule. In the beginning, it doesn’t really matter how often. Just block off two 10-minute windows twice a week, and use them to make posts to the platforms where you get the most traction.  

If you don’t actually block off this time in your calendar, you won’t develop the discipline required to get your message out consistently.

Maybe that isn’t a big deal to you: “Who cares about social media. I hate it!”

But it’s not about you. It’s about being where clients and prospective clients are. Social media isn’t going away in the next few years, so you’d be wise to ensure you have a presence there.

Just start with two posts a week and then work up to the optimal rhythm for your business and your audience. I’ll suggest that one or two posts a day will ensure you’re always present but never annoying to your followers.

If you’re not posting at all and hate social media, a post a day sounds like a ton of work. And it can be. But you don’t have to create 365 Mona Lisas. Consistency is more important than quality.

Some of the DFY riches of the Two-Brain Content Vault.

For Two-Brain owners, here’s the great news: You can ramp up to posting one piece of content a day if you have about five minutes in your schedule. Two-Brain’s Content Vault is packed with done-for-you content you just have to swipe and post. We’ve literally provided you with a year’s worth of media so you can develop the discipline needed to build your audience. Get in there and start clicking.

If you aren’t a Two-Brain client, you’ll have to create your own content, but keep it simple and work quickly. Then get it out the door.

The key: Never miss a post. Just like you know your clients need to hit workouts consistently to get results, you’ll need to keep the machine running if you want to build your audience.

And remember that you don’t have to do the posting. You just have to set up the schedule, create the plan and determine what “success” looks like. Then you can offload the job to a staff member.

I’ll say it again: Your business is your systems—the standard operating procedures that ensure consistency and excellence. Get your media systems in place today to connect with the people who will eventually become your clients.

The post You Post No Fire Emojis: Developing Social-Media Discipline appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How Two-Brain Helps Gyms Outside North America

Chris Cooper: (00:02)

“Whoa. It’s like you just threw a grenade into the audience, Chris.” That’s what I heard from CrossFit’s legal advisor the last time I presented in France. Hey, it’s Chris Cooper from Two-Brain Business. And today I’m gonna talk about serving gyms that are outside the US. How they’re different, how they’re the same, and if you’re in the US or even Canada, how you can use the lessons that we’ve learned from coaching hundreds of gyms overseas and apply them to your gym too.

Chris Cooper: (00:32)

So I started with this story from 2018. We had this whirlwind tour where over a two-week span, I had mentors speaking in Sweden, the U.K., Germany, and France. And we all kind of came together in Bordeaux at Daniel Chaffey’s gym. And there were hundreds of affiliate owners there. And from the stage through a translator, we were talking about value and what a gym should be charging for their services. And when we started talking about some of the rates that we were charging, people in the audience got really uncomfortable. Noticeably so. They started talking to one another, moving around, because at that time charging $200 a month was something that they had never heard before. And three years earlier than that, when we were talking about how to charge your true value in the US, we would get the same responses. So when I would go and teach these seminars, 2013, 2014, 2015, and I would talk about retention and ARM and client headcount and how headcount wasn’t the most important metric, you would get this same reaction, like a bomb had just gone off.

Chris Cooper: (01:39)

And so talking with some CrossFit HQ staff, which they’re all gone now, by the way, this is a different leadership group now. But the response that they gave me was, “Chris, on average, Europe is about three years behind.” They didn’t mean that gym owners in Europe are three years dumber or they’re quicker to catch on. It’s just that, that has been the spread of their brand across the world. That, you know, CrossFit Ireland was founded a little bit later than some of the original affiliates in the U.S. And, you know, CrossFit France. I don’t even think that’s the real affiliate name, but like CrossFit affiliates in France spread after that, et cetera. And so while a lot of the stuff is not always spread as fast, and while some might even feel that affiliates or gym owners outside the U.S. are behind, I have a counterpoint for you.

Chris Cooper: (02:33)

This counterpoint was COVID. And COVID lockdowns happened first in Beijing. Well, we have a gym in Beijing and we learned from them exactly what was happening. And then during the lockdowns, we started seeing things spread to, first Italy. And we were talking to gyms there about what worked. And then we were talking to gyms in Spain about what was working. And then we saw the lockdowns rolling west. And by the time U.S.-based gyms were forced into lockdowns in early 2020, we already had a working system that had been tested and proven overseas. And so by working with dozens, hundreds of gyms outside of North America, we get this worldwide perspective of what is working where, and right now it’s not always the same thing. The things that are working and popular in the U.S. are not always what’s working in Europe. It’s not always what’s working in Australia.

Chris Cooper: (03:28)

In fact, you know, Australia’s laws around hiring staff warrant kind of a different model than what we would do in Canada, for example, where it’s easy to hire subcontractors. So here’s what we do. Right now, looking at TwoBrainBusiness.com/map will show you where we have gyms that we’ve worked with. And what you’ll see are a few dozen gyms in the U.K., about half as many in Ireland, but you’ll also see several gyms in France. You’ll see many gyms in Germany. You’ll see some from Switzerland, many from Italy, Spain, Slovakia. I see some from Berlin here, Munich, Austria. I can scroll around. Here’s a gym in Romania. I can even find gyms in Asia. I can find a ton of gyms in Australia, New Zealand that we’ve worked with. So here’s what we do. First of all, we track data separately. So when people come in and they’re using the Two-Brain App, we automatically convert their numbers into our primary currency, which is U.S. dollars because we wanna compare apples to apples.

Chris Cooper: (04:34)

Now they can still see all their metrics in their local currency, wherever that is in the world. So if you’re tracking the British pound, that’s fine. If you’re tracking euros, you will see all of our dashboard metrics happen in euros. Then what we do is we look at, what are the best trends worldwide? And we publish those leaderboards, but we’ll also say, what are the best trends right now in English-speaking Europe? From there, we’ve got a good data set that we can use to help gyms around you if you’re in Europe or China or New Zealand. And we also hire mentors from around the world. So while our mentor team is about 40 strong, over 15 of those mentors live outside of the U.S. There are a couple from Canada. There are several from Sweden. There are some in the U.K. I know, sorry—Ireland is different from the U.K. I get it. There are some from Sweden—sorry, Sweden I said already. Australia, New Zealand, and we bring these people together, but we also make sure that they are on top of what’s happening in their home country. And so while a new gym coming into Two-Brain doesn’t necessarily have to work with a gym coming from their country to benefit from mentorship and data, it sometimes helps to have somebody in their time zone or somebody who speaks a different language. And we frequently get requests for mentors in French and in Spanish and in Italian, et cetera. Our RampUp program has subtitles for a lot of other languages. We have bilingual mentors and we have mentors who are natives of different countries, too. So we do work with a really wide variety of gyms successfully around the world.

Chris Cooper: (06:14)

What is the same across all these gyms? The general principles. The principles of value, the prioritization of retention, of building a client-centric business, of some of the strategies like mapping a client journey, having an on-ramp. These are things that work and the bonus is, they work anywhere. And if you’re in a place that is quote-unquote, “three years behind the U.S. in market exposure,” you will be the first adopter of these things. You’ll have a massive head start. And so while you do get a bit of a head start being the first CrossFit affiliate in Italy, you get a dramatic head start being the first good gym business in Italy that’s using the CrossFit method as a tool. So the big principles stay the same worldwide. The strategies differ. So I mentioned some of the tools and tactics like client journey, No Sweat Intro, but the reality is that a lot of the actual delivery looks the same.

Chris Cooper: (07:16)

What might be different? Local price point, absolutely. Valuation of local services, but also expenses, what you’re paying for rent. And these things usually scale together: what you charge and what you’re making in revenue versus what you’re paying out in expenses. The value of mentorship is still the same. And I would even say it’s heightened if you’re in a place in the world where business coaching and mentorship are not common yet. You have that first mover advantage. It also goes the other way. So there are places right now in the world where you really have never seen gyms before. Okay? Like United Arab Emirates. There are places where people have never had to even pay for fitness before, because the last generation was a generation of laborers. Their economy was still an industrial economy that we moved out of 50 years ago. They’re just moving outta that now.

Chris Cooper: (08:09)

And so this concept that you need to go somewhere else to get exercise is brand new. So what happens? Tons and tons of easy leads coming in the door. They need extra things like filtering. And we can learn from that. If you have a hundred leads coming in the door every month, what’s the best way to filter and qualify those leads? And we can teach that back to gyms in the States. And so often when you attend our Summit or you start working with a mentor at Two-Brain Business, you’ll encounter somebody from another country who has seen something slightly differently than you have, but their lessons are brought into our curriculum if it will help you. So the final piece of this, and if you wanna see, you know, where are the gyms that we work with? Go to TwoBrainBusiness.com/map. The final piece of this, this, I talked about general principles working.

Chris Cooper: (08:57)

I talked about strategies working. I talked about tactics being slightly different by market, but the filters also work. So if you’ve got a gym that’s absolutely killing it in Las Vegas. And they’ve got a new marketing system. We’re gonna test that system across the States first, then we’re gonna test it in Canada. Then we’re gonna test it in Australia, Europe. And if it extrapolates to everybody, then we’ll adopt it and teach it. But if it doesn’t work outside that one little gym in Las Vegas, we’re not gonna teach it to anybody else. And that is the power of data. Data does not know boundaries. It does not know languages. It does not know local customs. It does not know local perceptions of what pricing should be. You might think that everybody in Canada is cheap or that everybody in New Zealand knows one another, those things aren’t true. We can prove that with data. And data and mentorship will help you grow your business no matter where you are in the world. If you’re not in North America, it will give you an extra little bonus advantage because nobody around you will be getting this type of coaching. Hope that helps.

Mike Warkentin: (10:07)

Wherever you’re listening around the world, hit subscribe. Now, Coop’s back with another way to stay in touch.

Chris Cooper: (10:12)

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. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.

The post How Two-Brain Helps Gyms Outside North America appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Earn Freedom From Your Business Through Discipline

Chris Cooper: (00:02)

The strength of your business can be measured with one question, how successful is it without you there? My name is Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. And today I’m gonna talk to you about how discipline equals freedom, what discipline means in your business and how it creates success for your business to grow so that you can expand your platform, serve more people, make careers for your staff, and eventually earn your freedom. The way that you build a business that helps people and you make it your own is that you establish systems and processes and discipline. Now, I learned this lesson from Jocko Willink, and we’re going to talk more in-depth as we go here. But if you like this episode, please hit subscribe on your favorite platform. And that’ll be a signal to me to produce more stuff just like this.

Chris Cooper: (00:54)

Your business is not your marketing. Your business is your systems. The processes that your staff members use to deliver excellent service. These are the standard operating procedures that everyone follows on your team to be consistent, predictable, and excellent. I once walked into my gym at noon to this sight: chalky hand prints all over the floor. Two open-gym clients finishing their workout while the noon class waited and watched for them to be done. A potential new client leaning against the wall by the front door. A coach is half finished lunch on my front desk. Both bathrooms full with people waiting to change clothes outside, lined up. And loud, uncensored rap music that I would never play in front of my kids blaring. I started my day being the bad guy. “Hey, buddy, your workout time is over.” Cleaning up other people’s messes, smoothing over a very poor first impression and yelling at a coach to get their class started.

Chris Cooper: (01:57)
And then I spent the rest of the day angry, hating my business, but too distracted to do anything about it. Worst of all, I knew it would be exactly the same tomorrow. The problem wasn’t that my staff was lazy or that my clients were taking advantage of me. And I sure felt that way at the time. But the truth was that my entire business was all in my head. People were breaking rules that they didn’t know existed. They were following checklists that didn’t exist outside my mind. They were rising to their standards, which were very different from my standards. And they were trying to guess what I wanted them to do. Even though they weren’t mind readers. The problem was that I had no systems and without systems, I had no discipline in my business. As Jocko Willink told us at the 2020 Two-Brain Summit, discipline equals freedom.

Chris Cooper: (02:49)

When your staff knows to start classes precisely on time, they will. When your clients know to be ready because the class is starting directly on time, they will be ready. When your future clients know to book a No-Sweat Intro, instead of just showing up to watch a class or try it out, they will book a No Sweat Intro. When you have a cleaning process, you will have a clean gym. When you have a coaching process, your classes will be excellent. When you have an intake process, your clients will be onboarded more smoothly, stick around longer and get greater results. When these things happen automatically, you will have the freedom to build your business. But if it’s all in your head, you’ll have none of these things. Your internal goals, your standards, and your processes are just daydreams. So today I’m gonna tell you how discipline and rules make you and your staff more money.

Chris Cooper: (03:46)

Then I’m gonna tell you how to start getting your business out of your head and into a system. We walk through this process step-by-step in our ramp up program. Because if you dig deep enough into any problem faced by a gym owner, a lack of systems is usually at the root. Here’s how discipline makes you and your staff more money. The secret to making more revenue in your gym isn’t raising your rates, and it’s not getting more clients. It’s discipline. When I hired my first trainer at Catalyst in 2005, I was a bit worried about having the money talk with him. He had a few personal training clients of his own. He was also coaching a few sports teams on their fields of play. He would go out to the arenas and coach them for hockey. He’d go out to the football field and coach them for that.

Chris Cooper: (04:34)

I was worried that he wouldn’t wanna share the revenues for these clients with the gym and be part of this bigger movement. But I told him, “You have to charge everybody $135 per hour when you go off site. You can’t train anyone for free anymore. And I’m going to give you 44 percent of the proceeds for all of your clients, including the ones that I give you and the ones that you already have.” He said, “Deal.” No hesitation. Only later did I realize that my rules had solved some huge problems for him. First, he hated asking people for money. So he often wound up volunteering his time. And when he did get paid, it was far less than the 44 percent he’d make with my pricing. And now he no longer had to say, “Hey, I need to get paid.” He could say, “Here’s the price” or “Here’s an invoice.”

Chris Cooper: (05:27)

Finally, he wasn’t tempted to find his own side clients because it just wasn’t allowed. So he didn’t even think about it. Under my rules, my imposed discipline, he would make way more money with much less stress and frustration. And hey guys, he’s still with me 17 years later. So here’s six reasons you’re not making bank. When you fix these issues with discipline, your gym will be more successful. Reason number one, gym owners don’t pay themselves first. So I want you to have the discipline to write yourself a check, and you can hack this system by using another system like profit first. The reason two is that you don’t make enough money per client. So you have to have the discipline to set your rates appropriately and stick to them. Everybody knows the discounts don’t attract clients, but most of us have offered discounts because we don’t have the discipline to stick to our rates.

Chris Cooper: (06:23)

And usually this is a mental problem, not a demographic one. Reason three is they don’t keep clients long enough. So you need to have the discipline to maintain an excellent experience. You build excellence on a foundation of consistency. The rules must apply to everyone equally. Everybody must have a consistently excellent class or a personal training session or nutrition coaching program. For example, we used to sell open gym access between classes. One day, this client was doing a half marathon row during open gym time. With five minutes to go before class started and open gym time ended, he was still cranking away in the middle of the gym floor. The coach warned him that his workout would be finished in five minutes, whether he finished his half marathon row or not. Maybe he didn’t believe her, or maybe he thought he could row another 3,000 meters in five minutes, but he did not reach the 13.1 mile mark.

Chris Cooper: (07:26)

“Sorry,” she said, “but class is starting.” You’re done. Now, of course, that client got mad and quit the gym. But all of the other clients who were much higher value clients in our target audience who were a pleasure to coach, they were impressed. Their experience did not come second to anyone else’s experience. They didn’t have to wait around unfairly while someone else finished a poorly planned workout. The fourth reason that most gyms aren’t making money is that their expenses are too high. You have to have the discipline to rent only the space you need and buy only the equipment that you need. Have the discipline to do the math and make a plan instead of just buying the biggest toy box and then trying to fill it with people. The fifth reason that gym owners aren’t making money is they don’t have enough clients. So you have to have the discipline to make a marketing plan, to track your marketing metrics and determine what’s actually working instead of just firing random shots at your market saying, “Oh, I tried a hundred bucks on Facebook ads, and it didn’t work.”

Chris Cooper: (08:29)

That’s not a plan. And the sixth reason that people aren’t making money in gym ownership is that they wear the wrong hats. So you have to have the discipline to learn how to grow your business and how to ascend your team instead of just punching the clock and hoping for the best. Now, it isn’t easy to fix any of these problems, but everything gets easier with practice and you and I, we’re in the habit formation game, right? We coach discipline and habits and routines for a living. So maybe it’s time we took our own advice. Enforcing discipline in yourself is hard. Having a coach or a mentor makes it easier. If you want some precise instructions, get our free guide to solving each of the problems that I listed above by clicking through the links in the show notes. Enforcing discipline in your staff is really hard, but you usually only have to do it once.

Chris Cooper: (09:19)

When everybody sees that you’re going to stick by your published rules instead of running your business on your fluctuating emotions or expecting people to read your mind, they will come into line and you will have the freedom to help them. Instead of just constantly cleaning up their mess. Here is how to get your business out of your head. You give your business discipline by writing down exactly how you want everything done. And I mentioned Jocko a few minutes ago. In his book “Extreme Ownership,” Jocko says that he has a standard operating procedure for how his SEAL teams entered their vehicles, exited their vehicles, breached a doorway, penetrated a house, searched for evidence, collected evidence, dropped off evidence and presented evidence. They had an SOP for everything. This commitment to consistency created freedom. When things changed on the battlefield operators could change strategies without making guesses.

Chris Cooper: (10:18)
The best businesses in the world have SOPs for every tiny detail. Think about the best hotel you’ve ever visited. The room was spotless. There was a welcome note from the manager. Maybe there was a little chocolate on your pillow or some towel art on the bed. None of those things happened by accident. None of them happened because a staff person took the initiative or had an amazing work ethic. Your experience wasn’t unique. It was repeated thousands of times for thousands of guests. And it still made you feel special, but all of those things happen because of standard operating procedures. So where do you start? Here’s an SOP for creating SOPs. Here’s a model and an example. I want you to put a pen and a piece of blank paper in your car. And then I want you to drive to the gym as you normally would on any given day before you get out of the car, grab your pen and record where you parked and why.

Chris Cooper: (11:15)
Now I’m assuming you’re the first person in the parking lot. So you could have parked anywhere. Why did you park at the furthest spot from the door? Now I want you to walk to the entrance of your gym. And if you use the back door or the front door, write that down. Turn on the lights. Write that down. Flip on the open sign. Write that down. Turn on the stereo. Write that down. Select the correct station. Write down the one you choose and why. Continue writing everything down until your first class begins. You’ve just created your opening checklist. Now, maybe this seems like overkill. After all, your staff aren’t dumb. So why write the checklist and the SOPs as if they are? It’s because you don’t want gaps. Gaps get bridged by guesses, and no one guesses right more than half of the time. So you’re better to be too thorough than to leave any room for guessing.

Chris Cooper: (12:09)

Guessing means mistakes and mistakes mean correction, uncomfortable conversations with the people on your team. Do you really want to have to tell them they forgot to take the garbage out? Do you really want to have to tell them to park far from the door so that your clients can have the best spots? Do you really want to have a conversation about why they can’t enter through the back door or why they can’t tie up their dog outside? Or would you rather tell them to take the garbage out in advance? Here’s an extreme example. I once had a client in California with constant staff turnover. He lost all of his coaches in his first year, replaced them all. And then he lost the second crew too. He had a great location and some really good clients. He was a nice guy. And at first I couldn’t figure out why he had such high turnover.

Chris Cooper: (12:57)

One night, his staff closed the gym and went home without taking the garbage bags outside to the dumpster. When he opened the gym in the morning, it stunk of rotting banana peels. He couldn’t get the smell outta the air before his first clients arrived, even with all the doors open and a generous application of air freshener. He was driven to distraction by the smell. So he sent an email to everyone on his staff about a rant. It was a 200-word email rant about how bad the gym smelled, how careless it was to leave garbage in the warm building overnight and how banana peels were especially stinky. Now, maybe you’re laughing because you’ve received an email like that from an overstressed boss, or maybe you’re wincing like me because you sent one almost as bad and I’m totally guilty. But of course, that staff didn’t quit over one email, but then the owner wrote them, wore them down as these little breaches of common sense in his mind stacked up.

Chris Cooper: (13:56)

And he stopped calling staff meetings to address the problems. Instead he berated his coaches in front of others, or he sent them texts at 10 p.m. to complain. The problem wasn’t that his staff members were lazy or dumb or Gen Xers or whatever. It’s that they weren’t mind readers. There is no such thing as common sense. There’s just guessing. And so of course, this gym owner’s third wave of staff left and opened another gym down the street. And the gym owner started over with new staff. But this time we helped him tell them what he wanted in advance. Lo and behold, his gym became a comfortable, happy place. His clients no longer saw awkward exchanges between the owner and staff. They enjoyed the cleanliness and the on-time schedule. And they stuck around longer. The owner got some traction and his business began to grow. Nobody knows what’s in your head.

Chris Cooper: (14:49)

You have to get it out. So writing a staff playbook and SOPs takes a lot of time, but we have a great shortcut for you. We give you a full template to edit in our Ramp-up program. Finally, how to stress test your system and procedures. If your standard operating procedures are untested, you have to assume that they won’t work. And if your processes don’t make your business run without you, then they’re incomplete. Most of us have holes in our processes. There are things that staff members just can’t do, and we won’t find those holes unless we put our business under pressure. So now I’m gonna give you the exact steps to find and fix the gaps in your processes. And we call this the SOP stress test. So first write out your staff playbook. And if you’re in Two-Brain, go to the growth toolkit and you’ll find a complete template that you can just edit.

Chris Cooper: (15:42)

As you see fit, change the mission in there. Use my SOPs, copy what’s working, put in your own. It’s up to you. Second, deliver your new playbook to your staff at a meeting and have them sign off on it saying that they’ve read it and they understand. Then have your business run on these processes for three months, get some reps in. And then step four is to take four consecutive days away from the business plan. This time in advance, let your staff know that you will be away. Tell them you won’t be responding to email, but they can call you in an emergency. Now, if they call you while you’re away, record those calls because you need to remember the topics. And then when you return to the gym, write processes to solve every problem that came up while you were away. Then you’re going to provide training to avoid the same problems in the future.

Chris Cooper: (16:36)

Next, I want you to book a seven-day break from the gym, but this time you can have no communication with the team whatsoever, and you’re gonna have your staff document any questions or problems they have while you’re gone. When you return, debrief with each staff person or the one in charge. Write SOPs to cover the problems and record the answers to all their questions in your staff playbook. And then several months later, take two weeks away to the gym without contact and debrief. When you return, write SOPs to cover the problems and record the answers to all questions in your staff playbook. Why is this process so important? Because as you grow, your attention will get focused on larger opportunities instead of the day-to-day operation of your gym. So maybe you’re thinking about reaching the Tinker phase, scaling over 150 members, making more than $100K, opening a second gym or running seminars or whatever the next step is for you.

Chris Cooper: (17:36)

Or maybe you’re looking at buying another gym that’s open around the block or even opening a different business. Regardless of your reason, you need to be able to focus on higher level opportunities. The biggest problem faced when they get to this phase, where they need to scale is they keep getting pulled back into daily problems instead of working on the much larger opportunities right before them. So you need to solve your gym problems in advance. If you can’t solve them in advance, solve them when they happen, but only solve them once. Document the right answers, build SOPs and keep your hands outta the machine. Because you can’t drive the car if the hood is always up. One of the key disciplines that we teach in our ramp up program is that every day, you should start your day by doing one thing that grows your business before you do anything else. This requires discipline because you need to focus on the important work ahead of the urgent work.

Chris Cooper: (18:34)

If all you do is wake up and check your phone, you will be sucked into the world of high urgency, and you will spend the next 12 to 15 hours fighting fires and doing the urgent things. And when you return home tonight, you will find that your gym is in the exact same place it was in the morning. You haven’t grown at all. This discipline to create the time to do the things that actually build the business, it compounds. And you start by focusing on getting things off your plate. The very first thing you need to get off your plate is standard operating procedures so that people can do things to your level of excellence without your constant micromanaging. Final example. When I finally learned that this was the path to entrepreneurial success and freedom, I hired a cleaner and when Sean would come in to clean, he would start mopping.

Chris Cooper: (19:30)

And I would sit at my desk from 9 o’clock, till 10 o’clock at night. And while he mopped, I would start working on our newsletter because I knew at that time that that’s what it took to get more clients. Or I would start producing videos about personal training. And in some of our earliest Catalyst videos, you could actually hear him humming in the background. Or I would reach out to past clients, or I would start asking for referrals, or I would find speaking gigs. Whatever I could do to grow my business in that hour, because that was the only hour that I had. And I only had it three times a week while Sean showed up to mop. So for that investment, 15 bucks an hour or whatever Sean made back then, I was buying myself the time to do the stuff that would grow my business, but I had to have the discipline to use that time for that purpose when I was tired, when I wanted to go home and just go to bed. I hope this helps you. Discipline creates freedom by enforcing consistency. Consistent application at levels of excellence are what makes an excellent business. You do not rise to the level of your marketing. You fall to the level of your systems.

Mike Warkentin: (20:41)

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: (20:46)

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. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.

The post How to Earn Freedom From Your Business Through Discipline appeared first on Two-Brain Business.