Chris Cooper's Blog, page 93
June 24, 2022
Body Positivity and How Microgym Owners Killed the Fitness Dinosaurs
It blows my mind that some gyms aren’t welcoming to people of all sizes.
Yet Jill Barker, writing in the Montreal Gazette, recently suggested that “gym equality” is the exception rather than the norm in the fitness industry:
“In a society that increasingly promotes inclusiveness and body positivity, gyms are late adopters.”
I disagree, at least with regard to microgyms—including yours.
You’re way, way ahead of the curve.
The grammatically incorrect and badly punctuated headline applied to Barker’s June 19 article is the definition of stating the obvious: “Fitness: Gyms Should Welcome People of all Sizes, not Just One-Size-Fits All.”
Uh, yeah.
I’m not sure which ancient, old-school gyms Barker is writing about, but she’s taking the oh-so-timely approach of painting everyone with the same brush and passing on actual research in an attempt to criticize the greatest number of people in the shortest time.
Another quote: “Most gyms fall short of creating a welcoming atmosphere for people of all shapes and sizes.”
“Most”? I doubt that. “Some” might be a more accurate but less inflammatory term.
Here’s more: “Each individual can have the same health and fitness goals as anyone else who buys a gym membership, despite the association of exercise with thinness. Yet researchers revealed these exercisers feel judged, scrutinized and negatively compared with others while exercising.”
I’m not sure which research revealed that. The article isn’t clear. No study is named or linked to. I did some digging, and I believe it’s this one, which was published in 2016. As in, more than six years ago.
That timeline might explain why it seems like Barker picked up a 1983 copy of Muscle and Fitness and decided to criticize gyms of that era.
What Actually Happens in Microgyms
I’ve run a fitness business for 13 years. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word “thin.” I haven’t heard it from the thousands of coaches I’ve interacted with, either.
And I’ve never once met with an overweight person and thought, “I don’t want this person in my gym.” The actual thought: “I’m so glad this person is here. I can’t wait to help them in any way I can.”
Barker goes on to detail a list of body-inclusive conditions produced by George Cunningham and Andrew Pickett from the Department of Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M University. (Again, I think these are the authors of the study I linked to above.)
Let me summarize for you:
1. Leadership from owners and diversity in staffing.
2. Accommodating physical spaces.
3. Inclusive language.
4. A sense of community.
Since 2009, I have yet to walk into a microgym that lacks these elements. I’ve never yet met a microgym owner who would turn away, judge or abuse an overweight client. If such an owner existed, their gym has no doubt gone under. And good riddance.
In microgyms, prescriptions are highly personalized, trainers specialize in movement modification, and free weights ensure a person’s size is never an issue. We’ve had community in place since Day 1. It’s not optional in a microgym. It’s essential.
Here’s the common sense: In the microgym segment of the gym world, every single owner and coach knows that it’s bad business to treat any people badly. Microgyms exist to help clients of all shapes and sizes live happier, healthier lives.
Our Focus: Accomplishing Clients’ Goals
One of Barker’s closing shots: “Focusing on outcomes like improved strength, stamina and mobility instead of weight loss ensures success for all.”
Doesn’t that sound like the approach common in every single microgym since 2005 or so?
Perhaps traditional gyms created a culture where an overweight person might feel shame while rippling, oiled-up people in unitards and Zubaz pants pumped iron on machines and judged others. That culture might still exist in a few places, but it’s been ruthlessly hunted down and stomped out in microgyms for years. Maybe decades.
I think Barker’s article is generic, overly broad in scope and missing a lot of detail. But it does signal an opportunity for microgym owners and coaches:
If any segment of the public actually feels like the fitness industry is not welcoming to people of any size, you just found a target market.
All you have to do is show and tell people who might feel intimidated that you’ve always been set up to help them, you’ll never judge them, and you’ll help them find the quickest route to their own personal goals—whatever they are.
Get the message out to the public. Tell people you’ll welcome them, meet with them, offer them a prescription for success, coach them and build a long-term relationship with them so they can achieve their goals.
Then get them into your gym and change their lives.
The post Body Positivity and How Microgym Owners Killed the Fitness Dinosaurs appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 23, 2022
June 20, 2022
The Four Habits Every Successful Entrepreneur Must Master
Chris Cooper: 0:02
There are four habits that every successful entrepreneur needs to master to ascend from making $0 to making a million or $10 million or more.
I’m Chris Cooper . This is Two-Brain Radio. If this episode is helpful to you, please hit “subscribe” on your favorite podcast.
On June 4 and 5, I was speaking at the Two-Brain Summit. We had 426 gym owners from around the world—New Zealand to Sweden, Germany, France. It was amazing. And we were talking about impact. And we were talking about how to make a plan to have an impact on your family and on every single client who comes through your door and on the coaches who work with you—but also the impact on your local community.
And we went step by step, and every single gym owner left that room with a plan and a promise to create impact by next year. But underlying these plans are four habits.
Think of these as the foundation for success. And I thought I’d share just the four habits with you today. The first habit that you need to create a long-term impact is discipline.
Now I’m talking about a specific discipline. I’m not talking about eating right or doing meal prep or training or doing your mobility work or working on your weaknesses.
I’m talking about doing one thing every single day to grow your business before you do anything else—every single day. What do you do in that time ? It’s up to you. And it’s really up to your mentor.
Your mentor should be telling you objectively “here is the thing that you can do to grow your business right now.”
Now we have a lot of operational systems that our mentors use to determine what that exact thing should be.
But way back in the day, when I first started getting a mentor, he was giving me a ton of work and I just couldn’t keep up. And he would give me a big project. Like “you need to write a staff playbook.” And I’m like, “OK I know, but this is a four- or five-hour project at least.”
And every time I thought about it, it seemed to get bigger and bigger. And then finally, one day I said, “I’m gonna go to the gym 30 minutes earlier. I’m gonna do as much as I possibly can on this. And then I’m gonna put it away until the next day.”
Because what was happening was I was feeling like I was working a ton but not really getting anywhere at the end of the day. 9, 9:30 at night, I looked back on my day and said, “What did I actually accomplish to grow my business?”
Everything that I was doing was built to maintain my business instead of actually moving it forward. And so setting aside this time, like a half an hour at the start of the day to do something that grew my business before I did anything else, was actually the little baby steps that started giving me momentum to grow the gym, fix the gym, become super profitable and eventually build Two-Brain, too.
So the first habit that you need to create an impact is discipline.
The second habit that you need is respect. Good leaders don’t criticize, condemn or complain. I learned that from Dale Carnegie. This means don’t run down your staff to your other staff. Don’t complain about your clients to other gym owners in Facebook groups. Don’t attack other gyms out of jealousy or fear. Teach your staff respect. Model it to your clients. Teach it to the rest of us, your competitors, and me and the other people in your community by your example.
Now sometimes I struggle with this. It’s so easy to point to somebody else and say, “Hey, they’re cheating, right?” But that doesn’t help you. And it’s an anchor. That’s holding your rocket back. So the second habit that you need is respect.
The third habit that you need is influence. You need to share your story. You need to tell us why you need to share your mission, and you need to share your wins, and you need to share your losses. And you need to tell people why they should sign up with you and why they should stay with you until tomorrow. You need to tell this to your clients and your future clients and your former clients. And you need to tell it to your staff.
This means you need to publish something every day . And this means prioritizing who you’re telling this story to also. I mean, you have to tell your partner, “Hey, here’s why I want to do this.” And you have to tell your kids “here’s why dad worked so hard. And here’s why he’s spending all this time at the gym.” And you have to tell them “here’s what I want to accomplish.”
Through COVID, when we started emerging finally after almost two years of being shut down at Catalyst, I grabbed two of my staff, each of whom had been with me for more than a decade. And I said, “Guys, this is gonna be hard, but let’s go back to a blank slate. And let’s start with ‘what is our mission here? What are we trying to accomplish?'” And what we came up with was we want to extend and improve the lifespan of 7,000 people in Sault Ste. Marie. Now “extend” means help them live longer. “Improve” means improve their health-span. And I’ll do other shows on that later. 7,000, because that’s 10 percent of my population. And if I can influence 10 percent of 7,000, each of them might influence one more. And each of those people might influence one more.
And so what we did from this was say, “How do we rebuild our business to make sure that over the next 30 years we are extending and improving the lifespan of 7,000 people in this city?” And that led to some big changes. Number one, the staff said, “We only wanna work with 150 people at a time.”
Fantastic, but also we started publishing this stuff. And so we published this video about 7,000 people in Sault Ste. Marie and didn’t think much of it. Six months later, we won an award for best business in the city. Now, some businesses stayed open. Some businesses grew. Dome businesses closed during all the government shutdowns. Ours survived, but we weren’t the only one.
Why did we win this award—business of the year 2021? It’s because they said, “We know your mission and we see you working toward it.” Not “you’ve got the biggest business.” Not “you employ the most people.” Not “it’s smiley, happy, friendly.” “We know your mission. And we don’t know anybody else’s mission. We don’t know if they’re actually accomplishing it. The fact that you have a mission and that you published it is why you are our favorite.”
So that is what influence is. It’s storytelling and just telling people why. One more little note on influence: You gotta publish every day . At least a quarter of the stuff that you publish has to be internal to your staff. Have a podcast just for your staff or send a blog to your staff once a week, not just with “here’s next month’s calendar” or “here’s how to scale this workout” but “here’s why we’re in this.” So the third habit is influence.
And the fourth habit that you need is behavior. Now I did an exercise at the summit to help people identify who their hero is. Who is their model of success? Who do they wanna be like? And that makes this habit easier. But I want you to think, “Who is my hero?” What would your hero do when they’re faced with struggle? How would your hero meet or greet a new person? How would they say “good morning”? And what you want is this mental image in your mind of somebody whom you can act like until you are like them.
So, for example, when something hits me outta the blue and tends to derail me, I can say, “What would Karl do right now?” Or “how would Oskar behave?” “How would Anastasia handle this?” And then I can just be like them. I have some amazing clients at my gym, Catalyst, named Betty Lou and Dave. And these are the best greeters I’ve ever met. They’re so warm and caring, and they will stop their warmup, put down their barbell to hug you if you show up late to class. And when I’m not sure how to greet somebody, I just think, “What would Dave do? How would Betty Lou greet this person?”
And that means sometimes I’m a little bit over the top with greeting people, but it also means that I’m usually the most polite person in the room. It usually means that I get to be the one to make somebody else feel comfortable. They are my hero. And that means I can be like them.
So these four habits put together—discipline, respect, influence and behavior—will create impact. These are the pieces on which you build your systems and your tactics and your processes and your marketing and your sales and your team to have an impact on the clients who come into your gym, on your family’s wealth and on your community at large.
Announcer: 8:36
That was Chris Cooper on Two-Bain Radio. Chris is dropping knowledge bombs twice a week all the time . So please subscribe so you don’t miss a show. Now, Coop’s back with a final message.
Chris Cooper: 8:47
We created the Gym Owner’s United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now, it has more than 5,600 member 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 The Four Habits Every Successful Entrepreneur Must Master appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 18, 2022
The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your Gym’s Facebook Page
If you’re looking for the ultimate gym Facebook page management guide, you’ve found it.
Below, we’ll tell you:
Why your fitness business needs a Facebook page.What the best strategies are on Facebook for gym owners.The key steps to getting your gym’s page up and running.How to post to your gym’s Facebook page.What to post to your gym’s Facebook page.How to use Facebook Messenger to connect with prospective training clients.What media to produce at your gym.How to review your Facebook metrics.And more!
At Two-Brain Business, we emphasize referrals: Affinity Marketing should be the cornerstone of your marketing strategy. But developing a good gym Facebook strategy is critical to connecting with the public to grow your audience, generate leads and acquire new clients.
This article will help you maximize the time you spend on gym Facebook page management.
Why Facebook?
With more than 2.9 billion monthly active users as of April 2022, Facebook is the largest social media network on the planet. This fact is the primary reason every business needs a Facebook presence.
In an interview with HubSpot founder and CEO Brian Halligan, VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk said, “You can’t be alive in the game without Facebook. I genuinely believe that. I think it would be highly detrimental.”
In 2019, Facebook reached 70 million business pages globally. While this number indicates the importance businesses place on Facebook pages, it also suggests that your competition already has a Facebook presence. To stand out and maximize your gym marketing potential, you’ll need to create and curate content on your Facebook page that resonates with your fans—your target audience.
You can use your gym Facebook page to market to an extraordinary number of social-media users. And the amount of time those users spend on Facebook is incredible: Global analytics show that the average user spends almost one hour per day on Facebook, or about 7 percent of waking hours.
Your page functions almost like a personal profile, allowing users to “like,” learn about and engage with your business and brand. Also, it’s a communications platform: You can keep your Facebook fans abreast of your gym’s activities with updates on your page’s news feed. Beyond that, your page allows you to collect vital user data, track metrics and run precisely targeted ad campaigns.
Facebook is an incredible platform for gym owners. Learn how to use it.What Can a Gym Owner Do on Facebook?
Consider this non-exhaustive list of things a Facebook page allows a gym business to do:
Generate referrals and convert sales.Run targeted ad campaigns to generate leads or sell services.Provide customer service and FAQs.Manage relationships with current clients.Build and manage your reputation.Increase brand awareness.Grow your audience.Nurture leads and start sell-by-chat conversations.Provide automated responses to messages.Acquire glowing reviews that serve as “social proof” for prospective clients. Help prospective clients book appointments.
Facebook is essential for any fitness business. Once you read our gym Facebook page management tips, you’ll be ready to use the platform to grow your gym fast.
What’s the Best Gym Facebook Page Management Strategy?
There are many marketing options you can take on Facebook. But inbound marketing is the most cost-effective strategy of them all.
Inbound marketing is the strategic process of creating valuable content that appeals to the needs of your target audience, encouraging their engagement as a means of generating leads and developing a long-term relationship. By contrast, outbound marketing, such as a TV ad, interrupts people with content that might not interest them.
Here are some stats: On average, inbound leads cost 61 percent less than outbound leads. And consistent inbound marketing causes the average cost per lead to drop by 80 percent after five months. Plus, well-performed inbound marketing is 10 times more effective for lead generation than outbound.
Inbound marketing establishes a connection with visitors looking for your service as a solution to their challenges. It’s about aligning your gym business with their goals and finding creative ways to draw their attention to your services. Your Facebook Page makes you available in the space where people spend large blocks of time and want to be entertained.
Three Key Steps to Creating a Boss Gym Facebook Business Page
In the early 2000s, Facebook started as a social media platform for individuals who built personal profiles. The company began fully accommodating businesses about a decade later.
Similar to a personal profile, your Facebook business page displays specific information about your gym and allows you to make posts to an audience. People can view your page at any time, but they can increase the connection to a business’s Facebook page by liking or becoming a fan.
Before we proceed, Facebook has strict rules that separate a personal profile from a page, and you risk cancellation by establishing your gym business as a personal profile. Here are the key steps to creating your Facebook Page.
Introduce yourself on Facebook and make connections!1. Choosing Your Name and CategoryGo to the Facebook page creation area. At the beginning of the process, you must enter a name for your page, select a category and write a description.
Your page’s name will be part of your custom Facebook URL, and your exact business name is likely the obvious choice. For example, the Two-Brain Business Facebook page’s URL is https://www.facebook.com/twobrainbusiness. Your unique URL will help your branding when you cross-promote your page on your blog, Google Business space and website.
The Category dialog box allows you to start typing and then choose your business industry from a dropdown list. “Gym/physical fitness center,” “fitness trainer” and “fitness boot camp” are just some of the options you might want to consider.
Your next step is to add a brief block of text to describe your gym business and its purpose to your target audience. You have up to 255 characters to fully describe your gym business. This description will also appear in search results, so you should write it with your target audience’s needs and questions in mind. Be direct and clear, not clever and vague.
After all that’s in place, click “Create Page” to add images and other important info.
2. Adding Your Photos
Adding business photos is vital because they appear in the search results and news feeds. They also make your page much more appealing and help you establish your brand identity.
Your profile picture will be cropped into a circle for posts and ads, and it will display at:
170 x 170 pixels on computers.128 x 128 pixels on smartphones.
Your cover photo:
Your gym Facebook page management strategy starts with your profile picture because it is the first impression of your gym business on your page. In general, most businesses should use their logo. But in some cases you might use a unique symbol from your gym or a key player like a high-profile owner. If you are a famous person or the center attraction of your gym, consider using a professionally photographed headshot. Whatever you select must accurately represent your brand and appeal to your avatar client.
The cover photo covers the top portion of the page with a large, horizontal image. This image allows you to reinforce your brand and communicate important information about what you do. Make sure the image has a clear message, not a clever in joke.
You might consider working your gym’s tagline—e.g., “The Happy Gym”—into the image. You might feature staff members, happy clients, your facility—anything that showcases your strategic advantages and how you solve problems for clients. Whenever you have a special campaign running—like a nutrition seminar or weightlifting clinic—you might update the image to reflect that.
Include some text with the image and add a link people can click to find out more on your website.
If you’re starting out from scratch, you might need time to determine the right branding and imagery. You can work with an agency or do it yourself. If you go the latter route, you can evaluate themes by showing people you trust and asking for feedback. But get these essential branding elements locked down sooner rather than later. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so it’s important to show off strong branding ASAP on Facebook.
Be creative: Your goal is to get people to stop scrolling and interact with your media.3. Other Tweaks to Your Facebook Page Management StrategyAfter completing these steps, you can customize your page further.
For easier access, add a shortcut to your page on the vertical navigation bar left of the news feed—“edit your shortcuts.”To ensure you don’t miss any important events on your page, customize your notifications in the Settings menu.Add a call-to-action (CTA) button to encourage visitors to book an appointment, chat, visit your website and so on.Arrange your page tabs to steer visitors to the content you what them to see first. Also, you can customize your tabs (templates and tabs).The Best Ways to Get Facebook Likes and Fans
On Facebook, business page likes are what subscribers are on YouTube or what followers are on Twitter. When people choose to like your page, they are essentially requesting to see updates from your business in their news feeds. In other words, your likers are your fans, and they are giving you permission to tell them more about your products and services.
Invariably, you’ll come across advertisements from companies that want to sell you likes. These outfits use a “fake it until you make it” sales pitch based on the belief that more real Facebook users will like your page if you have a large number fake fans.
However, most Facebook users are too sophisticated to go for that bait. Also, Facebook itself doesn’t like fake fans and “black hat tactics” designed to cheat the system. This fact explains why the platform’s algorithm looks specifically at engagement rates instead of fan count. A significant gap between the two metrics can result in Facebook shutting down your account. So never buy likes, followers or subscribers on Facebook—or any social media platform, for that matter. It’s dishonest, and the practice will eventually cost your business when the hosting platform discovers what you’ve done and penalizes you.
Use the quality of your content and engagements to motivate users to like your business. To connect with actual people and grow your audience, get busy creating great content.
Ways to Promote Your Page on Facebook
Sometimes, the most mundane and routine tasks can be the most rewarding. An example is your page’s “About” section. This brief text (255 characters) provides a summary of your business to searchers, so make sure your description has searchable information without overloading it with keywords.
Even more important than that is making sure the description tells people exactly what you do and what makes your business special or different from competitors. For example, here’s Two-Brain’s description: “Two-Brain Business provides one-on-one mentoring for gym owners and fitness entrepreneurs.”
Your About section should also include your website, location, email address, phone number and other details. For example, some gyms will list their hours or price ranges, while other gyms will omit this information and present it in sales consultations. Whatever you choose, make sure your About section has all the info viewers need to understand what you offer and take the next step to connect with you.
You might choose to click the blue “Promote” button that appears on your page. That will take you into the world of advertising, boosted posts and marketing funnels, and it’s a completely different game. For now, we’ll just say that if you choose to spend any money on Facebook, make sure you track your return on investment (ROI) so you know if your dollars are generating more sales.
Spread the Word!
The next step is sharing your page with your contacts on Facebook by clicking on “Other Actions” and “Invite Friends.” Ask all administrators to do the same.
From there, you can use your personal account to let people know about your page. Make an announcement and encourage your friends and gym members to like your page and recommend it to their contacts. Be sure to direct-message your highly sociable friends who have many associates. Some of them will be happy to direct a lot of attention your way. If you have a connection with a social-media fitness influencer, let that person know when your page is online.
With a solid social-media strategy, your gym’s Facebook page can be a resource for current clients and prospective clients.Promoting Your Page on Other Platforms
Once your gym’s Facebook page is active, you can start promoting it through your other channels.
In no particular order, you can promote your page by:
Using your website: Put Facebook follow buttons on your site and use calls to action at the end of blogs to get people to share your post on Facebook or to like your page. You can also show a feed of your latest posts with a Facebook iframe code. But be very cautious with this approach. First and foremost, your website should push people to book consultations with you and your staff, and they’re unlikely to do that if you instead shuttle them off to Facebook. Don’t distract or redirect people. In a perfect world, your gym Facebook page funnels people to your website so they can buy products and services. A sale is far, far better than a page like. Don’t accidentally invert your funnel! Likes won’t pay your rent.Using your email list: Again, you want to make sure that your email list moves people to your website, but some people will appreciate social links where they can get to know you better. Social media is a good place to warm leads who aren’t ready to buy yet.Using other social media platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube provide the opportunity to cross-promote your social media activities. However, it is better to do it intermittently to avoid annoying your fans and followers. And keep in mind that no platform wants to send traffic to a competitor. So don’t bank on a lot of traffic from a link to Facebook in a YouTube video.
These cross-pollination strategies will work to some degree, but your No. 1 promotion tool is content. Read on!
Start Your Gym’s Content Machine
When it comes to gym Facebook page management, content is king and queen and everything in between. People need a reason to like, follow and engage with your page, so give them stuff to watch, read and listen to. Engagement is the key to building a vibrant Facebook community of fans of your page. Post often and keep track of what content generates the most engagement—then make more of it.
To capitalize on engagement, you should respond quickly to comments on your posts. Your responses should be well considered and authentic. Pass on lazily dropping a fire emoji on a comment and instead offer a genuine response that lets the person know a real person appreciates their interaction. Keep the conversation going!
Related tip: Respond to messages quickly as well. If you hit a 90 percent response rate with a response time under 15 minutes, Facebook will reward you with a green “very responsive to messages” badge. That’s a big deal for people who use Facebook as their primary means of communication and place a lot of weight on being able to connect with a business fast.
Do your research: What media do your ideal clients prefer? If it’s video, get the camera rolling regularly.The Basics: How to Post on Your Facebook Page
The white dialog box underneath your cover photo is where your correspondence with your fans happens. The phrase “Create Post” prompts you to type in your communication. This field contains a host of tools, including options that allow you to:
Add photos or videos.Tag people and locations.Create a live videoRun a poll.Host a Q&A.
You should experiment with different types of posts to see what your audience enjoys.
Remember, Facebook is no longer a place to dump a photo and leave. People want to be entertained by brands they’re interested in. Your gym Facebook page management strategy should not be “post because everyone says I have to even though I hate it.” You need to embrace the media and work hard to connect with your audience.
Making the Most of Facebook Posts
As stated earlier, engagement is the top prize for exceptional gym Facebook page management. Posting engaging content is the pivotal element when it comes to getting likes, comments and shares, and it will have a significant effect on your marketing goals. Without engagement, your page is nothing more than a reference for your members and friends. It won’t become a destination or key part of your funnel.
Furthermore, organic reach—exposure earned without advertising dollars—is increasingly difficult to get. Many of your fans won’t see the stuff you post because Facebook won’t serve it to them in their feeds. The best chance you have of getting into people’s feeds: Produce quality posts that generate engagement—discussion, comments, shares and so on.
Your posts should be intriguing, informative and relevant to your target audience’s needs. They should also be created with an eye on the media preferences of your audience and of Facebook itself. For example, if all your still images flop but short videos get lots of attention, you know what you should prioritize.
Any text you post should be concise, clear and directive. To put a professional touch on your writing, you can use editing apps or plug-ins like Grammarly and Shakespeare Pro.
If you have trouble developing compelling content, read Mike Warkentin’s Content Marketing Hack.
Two-Brain clients have access to hundreds of high-quality, done-for-you social media posts. They can be found in the Content Vault. For these entrepreneurs, Two-Brain has streamlined gym Facebook page management.
Your goal: draw out engagement. Comments, shares, messages are all better than a simple like.Links in Your Post
To post a link to a blog, a video or other media, write a brief lead-in sentence before pasting the link at the end. For example, sample text for a post link could be, “Hey, Iron Gym Warriors! Check out this new blog on the best post-workout snacks for people who want to build muscle: (INSERT URL).”
Your main goal on social media is to get people off social media and onto your website, but remember that Facebook wants to keep people on its platform. Sometimes it’s best to post engaging content in full to Facebook instead of linking out.
So then how do you make sales? Selling by chat through Facebook Messenger is one option (see below).
Using Media in Your Post
BuzzSumo.com reported that Facebook posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than posts without them. You can post an image by selecting “Photo/Video” in the bottom left corner of the post dialog box.
In 2022, you’d be very wise to post a lot of video content, too. Here’s what Hootsuite reported: “In February 2022, Facebook expanded Reels from its initial launch in the U.S. to worldwide. Facebook says that half of all time spent on Facebook and Instagram is spent watching video, and ‘Reels is our fastest growing content format by far.’”
Facebook videos give you an excellent opportunity to use short and longer content to reach people who are crazy for visuals, short stories and entertainment.
For example, you could create a mini-documentary about your gym and the people who make it unique. Or you could post happy people working out. Or maybe you create a comical, entertaining skit called “stuff people don’t know about gym etiquette.” How about “five things Coach Jess ate yesterday”? Could you re-enact the comical Globo Gym ad from “Zoolander”? Be creative to reach people.
Another excellent video promotion tool is Facebook Live. As an alternative to pre-recorded video, you can use Facebook Live to provide real-time coverage of your gym. Consider a live video when you have a special event, or just go live from time to time to show off “what’s happening at the gym” or answer fitness and nutrition questions from people who start watching after they see the notification about your live feed.
Whatever you do in 2022, don’t avoid video!
Can you make sales through direct messages on Facebook? Absolutely.Using Facebook Messenger in Your Sales Strategy
Facebook Messenger is the platform chat feature that gives you a more convenient connection to potential clients than email. Many people prefer Messenger to other forms of communication, and modern consumers want to be able to message their favorite brands. Your gym can use Messenger as part of its customer-service and marketing strategies.
On the sales side, Messenger can be handy for booking No Sweat Intros (NSIs) or getting prospective members to sign-up.
Using a professional sell-by-chat team, Two-Brain Business conducted a three-month test in which the sales experts initiated 40 chats a day with qualified leads. The results indicated that sell by chat has about a 2 percent close rate, close to the average sales conversion rate across all industries of 2.46 to 3.26 percent.
However, engaging in 40 chats a day can be very time-consuming. So, you should compare the chat conversion rates with your other gym sales methods to determine whether it is worth your time. Generally speaking, Two-Brain Business recommends sell by chat for gym owners with the extra time to devote to social media.
Sales through Facebook Messenger will also be more successful with certain demographics. For example, imagine trying to sell a seniors program by chat. Now imagine selling a nutrition course aimed at 18-to-22-year-old college athletes.
A simple strategy: Offer a free resource and ask people to request it by commenting. Then send the resource via direct message and start a conversation that might lead to a consultation booking.
Whatever you do, make sure you check your page’s inbox regularly and respond to messages as fast as possible!
Don’t guess when it comes to your gym’s Facebook strategy. Review your metrics to optimize your page and your media.Metrics and Gym Facebook Page Management
When you click the Insights tab under “Manage Page,” you will see an overview section with a seven-day summary of the activity on your page—you can select various time periods that give you the info you want. Facebook provides detailed stats on all sorts of things, including:
Data drives engagement. Whether you plan to increase brand awareness or sales conversions, your gym Facebook page management success depends on the frequency of your posts appearing in the feeds of prospective clients. By reviewing data, you’ll have all the info you need to create the content people want to see and engage with—content that will help you grow your audience.
Rewards From Gold Standard Gym Facebook Page Management
Your gym Facebook strategy might never produce the results of your Affinity Marketing approaches to warm leads. But you have to start warming cold leads, too, and Facebook is just the place to do that. The powerful effects of gym marketing on Facebook are undeniable—whether you prioritize an organic or paid approach.
Facebook provides powerful marketing channels and tools that dwarf those available to gyms a decade ago. Though organic reach is declining, Facebook is still an incredible platform for fitness entrepreneurs. It’s definitely worth using our gym Facebook page management tips to grow your audience and increase your brand’s reach.
Two-Brain Business specializes in helping gym owners create solid, stable businesses that evolve, adapt to current trends and provide clients with results. And we have social-media playbooks and marketing assets that smash the learning curve so you can get results fast. For info about working with a mentor to grow your fitness business, click here to book a free call.
About the Author: John Burson successfully ran a personal-training business for over 20 years, and he has written volumes of published articles on business entrepreneurship, finance and the fitness industry.
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June 17, 2022
And We’re Back: A Report From the 2022 Two-Brain Summit
Action creates impact—that was my No. 1 takeaway from the 2022 Two-Brain Summit in Chicago.
Over three days, I spoke to hundreds of gym owners, coaches and fitness entrepreneurs, and it was clear that everyone was moving forward.
After two years of the COVID pandemic, it was exactly what I needed to see—and I’m sure everyone else in attendance felt better after a weekend together.
Two-Brain hasn’t been able to host a large, in-person Summit since 2019. We’ve put on two great online events that featured smaller regional meet-ups, but we hadn’t gathered en masse in three years.
Let’s be blunt: Two of those three years were likely the most difficult in the history of the fitness business. Gyms weren’t even able to open for lengthy periods in most places, fearful clients retreated to garages and basements, and ever-changing government mandates forced pivot after pivot. We all lost a lot of sleep in 2020 and 2021.
But in 2022, I didn’t get the sense that I was surrounded by weary, beaten people. Sure, every entrepreneur at the Summit had war stories and some new scars, but I didn’t see any broken spirits. Instead, I saw a lot of committed people who are taking action.
It was amazing to speak to people individually and hear about all the things they’re doing in their businesses. And it was great to watch them literally taking action at the Summit. As I walked around, I saw gym owners and coaches creating client avatars, dialing in mission statements, improving skills, connecting with accountability partners, and creating careers for themselves and others. This is the kind of stuff that has dramatic effects on a business.
Sure, some gym owners are still in the hurt locker. And others are tired. But the ballroom at the Crowne Plaza wasn’t full of tears and complaining. It was full of action. Even better, the gym owners who are thriving were only too happy to offer assistance to those who are still recovering.
From the stage, each of the speakers presented clear, actionable info that supercharged the group of gym owners. Hiring, marketing, coaching, staff development, leadership, vision—our presenters offered cheat codes for all of it. Many entrepreneurs moved their businesses forward measurably before they even left the ballroom, and all of them expanded their support networks after a weekend together.
The pandemic took a lot of stuff from a lot of people. A sense of community is definitely high on that list. In Chicago on June 4 and 5, hundreds of gym owners got that back, and I can’t wait to see what they accomplish in the next year with more support, a renewed sense of purpose and the guidance of an experienced mentor.
Thanks to everyone who made the event special. Keep in touch, and keep moving forward.
The post And We’re Back: A Report From the 2022 Two-Brain Summit appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
June 16, 2022
Profit and Passion: The Dichotomy of Successful Gym Ownership
Chris Cooper: 0:02
“It’s not about you. It’s about the client. You’re not your own best client. Tailor your business to serve them! But also, you should pay yourself first and you should make sure that you are fed before everybody else, so the business carries on.” How can both of these things be true? They seem like a dichotomy.
My name’s Chris Cooper, I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business. And today I’m gonna talk to you about dichotomies in business, how to build a client-centric business and why you do need to make a good living and think about profit and serve your clients so that they get amazing results . If this episode is helpful to you, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so that we know, and I’ll keep making topics just like this.
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin wrote a book called “The Dichotomy of Leadership.” It’s a fantastic book. And when Jocko appeared at the Two-Brain Summit, I asked him a question about these dichotomies and he gave me some really interesting examples, but I’m the kind of guy that I need to have a picture in my head. I need to form a mental model before I can really understand a concept.
And so today what I’m gonna talk about is the difference between the method that you use to get your clients results, and the business model or the platform on which you deliver this method. And I’m gonna give you some examples as we go.
My first gym was not Catalyst. I actually started a personal training business called Focusstrength way back in 1998. I had just come back to my hometown after a couple years working away in Illinois, that area. And I started doing some personal training and I got a job at a treadmill store to pay the bills. And after the store closed, I would go out the back loading doors. And in the parking lot, there would be an athlete waiting for me, usually with a skipping rope.
And we would unload an old barbell from the back of my truck. I might have a pile box. I might have a sled, but that was it. And we would train in the back parking lot. And I called this business Focusstrength, and I printed up a couple of t-shirts, probably whatever the minimum order was, and started an email address.
And that was my entire business, was a little bit of equipment and a couple of t-shirts. I might have hand printed some business cards, but I don’t remember. We did everything one-on-one. I only worked with athletes and I would give them homework.
And that worked for a while until their parents started asking me to train them. And so their parents would show up and they’d say, oh, don’t we have anywhere else to work out? Like, I have to train in this parking lot? And they didn’t really like that, and they felt it was too public. So I made a deal with a gym and the parents would meet me there, and I would train them in this gym. And then I started to notice, oh, when I give my athletes homework to do on their own, they would 100% do it all the time. But these clients didn’t. Huh .
And so I can’t just see them once a week and give them homework. I have to see them more often to make sure that they actually do the work to be successful. And so I started making more appointments with the parents and regular people, non-athletes, and I would see them three or four times a week. And eventually my book of personal training filled up and I decided it was time to quit my job managing this treadmill store and start working just as a personal trainer. And over time, what happened was that I had so many quote-unquote “regular clients” who were looking to lose a little bit of weight, get fit, that I just couldn’t take any more. My book was filled up and that’s because my model was one-on-one training. I was selling my time by the hour. Then I got acquired.
Well, I got hired by a personal training studio and I started working for them. And, you know, again, my book was filled up and I was charging a little tiny bit more. So I was making more money, but I still was running the same model. And so when your book is full, then you can’t grow. You’ve hit the ceiling. The model, I reached the limits of the model of personal training. I couldn’t literally book more clients.
One day I had 13 clients booked back to back for an hour each with no lunch break. And that was nuts. And the methods that I was using were changing. At the time, I was doing some plyometric stuff, I was doing some powerlifting stuff with my clients. I was trying to get them to go, like, do some extra light work. I was calling it cardio back then.
I tried to get them to do some cardio on their own. They probably wouldn’t do it. So my model was fine. It was limited. I reached the end of the business model of personal training. My methods needed some improvement.
And so eventually we found CrossFit and that was our became our new method. And so we were delivering CrossFit type workouts to clients, one-on-one, but we still had the same model, right? So our clients were getting better results now, which was awesome.
They liked their workouts better, also. Very cool. But our model was now the limiting factor. And the model was that we were still booking people one at a time. And so we would sell out our entire book and really, you know , cap out our income.
Then we discovered what we thought was the CrossFit business model and I was wrong, but I won’t go down that path. What I thought was the CrossFit business model was, you just run group classes and you have 12 people, and that’s how the trainer makes more money.
And that’s how you get more clients results. So we opened up a second location. Now thank goodness I still had a lease on my personal training studio, because the second location almost bankrupted me. And so I was running two separate businesses at once.
In one location, I had a great personal training studio. I had maxed out that model. I couldn’t make more money, but I was making an income from there. In the other location, I had this CrossFit gym and I thought, okay, here , this is all kinds of opportunity. I will grow this gym really quickly. I’ll get people in, we’ll put them in group classes. And of course that didn’t work.
And you know, I’ve shared tons of that in my books and on this podcast before. I won’t go down that road. In that case, in the second gym, and it was CrossFit Catalyst, the method was good. CrossFit.
The model was not. The model of, “Run group classes, no Onramp. Just try to get as many people as you can.” That model wasn’t working. I thought it was, because that’s what people on Crossfit.com were saying on message boards, but it really didn’t.
And so what happened by, you know, force, was that I had to merge the two models. So in that case, the method was awesome. It was getting results. It was fun to coach. It was great for me, exciting, but the model nearly bankrupted me.
Now I share three business models for CrossFit affiliates that do work. They’ve been proven to work. We’ve worked with well over a thousand CrossFit gyms. At this point, you can get those three models for free if you go to GymOwnersUnited.com. If you just want to coach big classes, there’s a model there that will work for you. If you want to use the model that the most successful gyms in the world use, successful, you know, measured by data, then you can download that model.
And the third model is the full-on hybrid that a lot of gyms are evolving to now.
Just go to GymOwnerUnited.com, you can download those for free.
Okay? So back to the method and the model. The method is the skills that you’re using to get the clients results. And that could be CrossFit. It could be kickboxing. It could be boot camp , Pilates, yoga, whatever that is. The model is how your business is set up.
It’s the platform on which you deliver that service. Now, the method that you choose will change over time. I guarantee it. No matter how passionate you are about yoga right now, that method will evolve over your career. And so will the model, the model that you run will probably change too. It will also evolve.
These things will not usually evolve at the same time. You won’t change your method a little bit and then change your model to match. Usually one is changing, but at all times one or the other is usually evolving.
Okay ? It’s important to know that while the method and the model both evolve , they’re not the same. Okay ? Your method should be client-centric. That means you choose your method based on what is going to get your client’s results.
And you change your method when the needs of your clients change, or you identify something new that they need. Your method is there to give your clients what they need. Your model should also be client-centric. Your model is the dosage, the delivery, and the price. Your model is there to give clients your service in the way they want to buy it.
And that’s the important differentiator here. The method gives the clients what they need. The model gives the clients what they want. Originally, when I was doing personal training and coaching exercise, clients weren’t getting results. Way back in the day.
And if I’d started my question differently, like what is the method that will get these clients results? Then I would’ve built my business differently.
First off, I would’ve probably started with a nutrition program with the barbells in the back parking lot. But that’s a story that I’ve told a hundred times already. So a few years ago, when we were doing group classes, our model was really solid. We had group classes, small group training and personal training.
We decided that the best way to evolve our method to get clients better results was to include nutrition coaching.
But now we were adding this service without charging more for it. So we were over delivering and my margin really suffered. Again, it fell, like, close to zero. And so I had to change my model to match my method again. I wanted people to do CrossFit or do personal training, but I also wanted them to do nutrition.
And this is where the prescriptive model really started to shine through because it allowed me to prescribe the right stuff to the right clients. So for example, the method is , workout, do our workouts and follow this nutrition plan or this habits guide or whatever. However, not every client needs or wants to do both right now.
And so our business model is the prescriptive model, which means I can tell you what’s best for you. You can decide at what pace you wanna tackle these things, at what price you want to engage, you know, depending on your budget.
And you can also say, I’m gonna do this for now, and I’m gonna do that later. Okay ? Because the prescription changes over time. And so our model reflects that. Our model is plastic. It’s, here is the right prescription for you right now.
So your method might be yoga or Pilates or kickboxing or boot camp or circuit training, or orange theory, or F45 or CrossFit. But the meta model should be prescriptive. How much, how often, how intensely. These should be tailored to the needs of the client. Should they work out one-on-one, or in a group? It depends on the client. Some want to do CrossFit workouts, but they wanna do one-on-one, some wanna do kickboxing, but they only wanna do it in a group.
Should the client do CrossFit or heart rate training or yoga? It depends on the client. You don’t need to provide all of these options, but your model should provide a way for your clients to get them. You don’t have to be the master of all methods. If you want to teach kickboxing and yoga, you don’t have to build both of those in your gym. You don’t have to go get certified in the method and then teach them in the gym yourself.
You could have a partner for yoga, where you refer people out as part of your model. The method should be plastic, flexible and different for each client. But now let’s talk about your model a bit more. In a client-centric business, the options that you sell should be determined by the preferences of your client.
Some clients need more accountability. Some want to be in a group with their friends, some need scheduling flexibility. So they’re gonna book appointments one-on-one instead. Some are on a budget, so they’re gonna choose the group option, which is your lowest budget option. So a method is what your client needs. Your model is how your clients buy based on what they want.
Now, our method at Catalyst has evolved from body building way back in the day to powerlifting, because I love powerlifting, to CrossFit to now metabolic training. The model at Catalyst has shifted from one-on-one only, way back in the day when I was limiting my time that I could sell for money, into group only, into combination of one-on-one and group, into high ticket hybrid, and now to the prescriptive model. And this is where we stand today, both the prescriptive model and the metabolic method that we’re using, our client-centric method provides exactly what our client needs.
The method has evolved with science and experience. And the model is also client-centric. The model lets the client consume our method in the way that they like best. The model has evolved through data from Two-Brain Business, through lots of trial and error, and from feedback from our best clients. So we don’t take surveys and change our model based on the survey.
But we do pay very close attention to the goals and outcomes of our top clients and shift the method and the model to match them. Our clients don’t know enough about training to determine our method, right ? That’s our job. We’re the coaches, we’re the owners, we’re the experts. We pick the method, but we as owners also don’t know enough about what our clients like or want to buy or their schedule or their budget to make those choices for them.
So it’s our job to listen to our best clients and build our model to suit them. In my book, “Start a Gym”, I broke down the difference between the method and the model. Your method will probably evolve slowly, but it will evolve. CrossFit affiliates, I’ll give you guys another micro example . So CrossFit’s method evolved from, “Just spin the hopper every day and every way”, way back, 2001, to constantly varied functional movement at high intensity.
Now, if you were around CrossFit in 2005, you would’ve seen exercises in time domains that you just don’t see today, right? Like a 30 minute row or a virtual snow shoveling they called it, or parkour. For example, the method has evolved. CrossFit’s model started as one-on-one and then two clients to one trainer, two-on-one, and then to small group, and then to larger group. If you were at the original CrossFit gym , you wouldn’t have seen big groups of more than five or six, but the model evolved to big groups. And now it’s evolving again to small groups of about seven to 13.
And that’s how this dichotomy can exist. The model should make the owner profitable. The method should get the clients results. Neither can exist without the other. For long, thousands of gyms have gotten their clients good results and then went bankrupt anyway.
Likewise, many gyms have made a bunch of money in their first year and then just faded away because they couldn’t provide results. The key to long term success is the willingness of the entrepreneur to evolve their method around their client’s changing needs or their changing clientele, and also to evolve their model around the best science and data available.
My gym is evolving its method right now. We’re evolving into a science-based method, which I’ll talk more about another time. But our model at the gym is the prescriptive model. This is the meta platform on which we prescribe activities for our clients, depending on their goals. So we’ll prescribe diet and exercise depending on what the client needs. And then we’ll prescribe dosage depending on what the client wants.
We’ll review those needs regularly, and we will be profitable because the best idea is useless if its flame is snuffed before it starts a fire. So this is how the dichotomy of profitable gym aligns with Help First, do whatever it takes to get the client results. I know that some people want these things to be separate. They wanna say, quit worrying about being profitable.
Just focus on getting the clients results and you’ll be successful. Thousands of CrossFit affiliates would disagree because they’re gone now, right ? They went out of business trying to do that. On the other hand, and this is good news for most of us, the gyms who are mostly just worried about money and profit and they don’t care about the clients, they’re not successful for long either.
And we saw that a few years ago, as people turned to these kind of high-ticket Facebook, cold lead, high pressure sales techniques, there was a bait and switch, right? What happened? Lots of clients came in. Lots of clients signed up. They paid lots of money. 30 days later, those clients were gone and they hated the gym. So these two things have to exist in tandem. And this is actually why we’re called Two-Brain Business. The left side of your brain, the logical side, means you have to make money to succeed.
The right side of your brain, the caring, empathetic side, means that you care so much about these people and your method that you wanna deliver it to them and change their lives. The two things go together and they actually live in harmony and complement one another. They’re not in competition with one another.
I hope this helps you with some perspective. I hope that your method is evolving and I hope that your model is making you get closer to your perfect day every single day. Thanks for listening.
Mike Warkentin: 18:12
This is Two-Brain Radio. Chris is always cranking out the content, so be sure to hit subscribe so you see it all, and hammer a like on this show before you go. Now here’s Coop one more time.
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June 13, 2022
June 10, 2022
What Gym-Growing Jobs Are You Avoiding—and Why?
Tough question: Are you doing low-level jobs at your gym because you’re intimidated by tougher tasks?
I’ll answer first: I definitely did this.
Example, I spent hours shoveling the parking lot in winter because I didn’t want to improve my weak sales skills.
Now you answer the question—and be honest.
Over the last decade or so, I wasted all kinds of time in my business. This is perhaps the best example:
But I have more. They include:
Patching and painting drywall.Cleaning.Replacing broken toilets.Mowing the lawn.Trying to fish broken keys out of locks.
And so on. I won’t bore you with the rest of the list.
Let’s be clear: Everything I listed above had to be done. But not by me.
I justified my time investment by telling myself I was saving money.
“I can mow the lawn in an hour—so why would I pay someone $12 to do it? I can save that money.”
This is small thinking. It should be clear that my time as CEO of the business was worth more than $12 an hour. I could have simply paid someone $12 to free up that time so I could coach another class and give my members a 10-out-of-10 experience. That would have been a much better use of my time: I would have “sold” that hour for $25 instead of $12.
Or I could have gone much further. For example, I could have invested that hour in sales training to improve our close rate. I could have sent a newsletter promoting our fall special event. I could have taken coffee to a neighboring business and asked how I could help staff become healthier. And so on.
I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t want to do that stuff, so I mowed.
I hate sales. So instead of getting out of my comfort zone, I did some mental gymnastics to tell myself that I was “saving money” by mowing the lawn. I was actually just avoiding sales and marketing.
I had constructed a narrative that would allow me to stay in my comfort zone. But that narrative also ensured my business wouldn’t grow.
Now, after working with a mentor, I understand that this sort of thing is commonplace. I’m not rare.
A few fictional examples that I hope will prompt you to examine your own behavior:
A gym owner who insists on coaching every class to “maintain standards” is actually avoiding reviewing monthly financial statements.A gym owner who obsesses over which floor scrubber to buy is avoiding giving an underperforming staff person a review.A gym owner who reorganizes the storage room doesn’t want to research how to implement a badly needed rate increase.Ask Yourself a Hard Question—Then Get Help
Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper has talked about “climbing the value ladder” for years, and he even has a complete step-by-step process to help you offload low-value jobs to focus on tasks that will actually grow your business. I don’t need to tell you how to invest your time better. That info has been around for years. It’s a plug-and-play solution.
Instead, I’m going to ask you why you aren’t investing your time better.
I’ll give you one answer that covers a host of scenarios:
You don’t have anyone to support you, guide you and hold you accountable.
It was easy for me to shovel because no one said, “Mike, you’re wasting your time and hurting your business. Do exactly this instead, and text me when you’ve done it.”
When someone actually said that to me, I stopped shoveling and started improving my business. It had nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with support and accountability.
So one more time: What are you avoiding right now?
Whatever it is, a mentor can help. Click here to book a call and find out more.
The post What Gym-Growing Jobs Are You Avoiding—and Why? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
