Chris Cooper has published nine books—and counting.
If you haven’t seen them all, I’ve got the list, along with a key excerpt from each book.
Do you need to read all of them to run a great gym?
No. It would be better to read just one book and take action than to read all of them and do nothing.
Pick one and use it to improve your business.
And if you need a recommendation, start with No. 9, “The Golden Hour.” It’s Coop’s most directive book, and you can use it to ensure you move your business forward after reading any other book for the rest of your life.
1. Two-Brain Business
If I build a bigger gym, they’ll all come.
If I get better at coaching, I’ll be better at business.
If I produce a high-level athlete, I’ll get more clients.
If I get more clients, I’ll make a better living.
None of these are true. There are gaps and missing steps.
How do we cross those gaps? That’s the question this book will answer.
2. Two-Brain Business 2.0
You manage what you measure. It’s a common phrase in business and gyms alike.
Knowing your annual retention rate is important. Knowing your gross monthly revenue is important. Knowing your net is far more important. Knowing the difference is critical.
Failure to measure your business makes for a poor businessperson.
When you open a gym, you’re no longer an athlete/coach. You take on the responsibility for providing a rewarding job for others and a great place to train your clients.
Without measurement, you can’t do either for long.
3. Help First
You depend on your business, but you hate selling.
This is the biggest pain point of the entrepreneur.
And this book will solve that problem.
Ten percent of readers will only need the first chapter of this book.
When your clients know they need your help, you’ll never have to sell anything again.
4. Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief
Theory is nice. And ideas are fun. And the romantic notion of the entrepreneur is an easy sell: tired but happy, driven and passionate, and on track to a guaranteed million-dollar sell-off if they can just survive the grind for three years.
But theories and ideas don’t put food on the table.
What does put food on the table?
The answer to that question evolves with the four phases of entrepreneurship: founder, farmer, tinker and thief.
5. Gym Owners Handbook
Your business has two parts: your operations and your audience.
“Operations” refers to the service you provide. “Audience” refers to the people who trade their money for your service.
Each is a multiplier of the other: If your service is excellent, you’ll build a broader audience. And the bigger your audience, the more of your service you’ll sell. On the other hand, if your service isn’t as great as you think, your audience will shrink. And if no one’s heard about you, you don’t have a business.
In this book, I’m going to tell you how to maximize both sides of your business. First, we’re going to talk about delivering real excellence and measuring that excellence to ensure future growth. Then I’m going to tell you how to build an audience—the right kind, not just a bunch of cold leads from advertising.
6. Start a Gym
The decisions you make at startup—or even before—will affect the rest of your life. Your business can be the engine that feeds your family, pays for vacations and changes the lives of hundreds of people in your city. Or it can be the thing that ruins your life. The decisions you make now will echo for decades.
Every mistake you make at the start will take a year to fix. I made mistakes in my model: pricing, staffing, ideal clientele, location and equipment. It took me six years to fix all of these problems—six years that I could have spent making more money, spending more time with my kids and worrying a lot less.
Now that my gym is successful, my mission is to make 1 million fitness businesses successful so that we can change the world’s health together. I do that through mentorship and books like this.
7. The Simple Six
There are six ways to grow your business. But you can only use them if you learn to focus.
The magic of the Simple Six comes from focused work, and this book will teach you how to grow your business one step at a time while avoiding distraction and overwhelm.
This is not a “knowledge” book. This is a “results” book. It works because simplicity scales faster.
Cut through the overwhelm, the ideas, the distractions and the stress. Get clarity, make a plan quickly, and see results like you’ve never seen before.
8. Millionaire Gym Owner
Sustainability isn’t enough. You must make enough income to provide for your present needs—and enough to pay for your future, too.
To really be successful, you can’t expect to work until the day you die. You need to gather enough assets, investments and cash to pay for your lifestyle after your income stops.
This book will tell you exactly how to do that.
I want gym owners to be wealthy, and I want the good people to win.
Here are 12 who have.
9. The Golden Hour
Why do some gyms grow 32 times faster than most, and why do the top 12.5 percent of gym owners in Two-Brain Business outperform everyone else—even when every gym in Two-Brain is growing at triple the industry average?
The secret is shockingly simple: Every day, they do one thing to grow their business before they do anything else.
What’s that one thing? In this book, I’ll tell you exactly how to set up your Golden Hour and what to do every single day to grow your business.
“The Golden Hour” might be my favorite book I’ve ever published. And I’ve heard from a lot of people that it’s their favorite or that it’s the best because it’s the most directive. I love to hear that because action—not just knowledge—produces better businesses.
Read and Act!
That’s the list—with more to come.
I hope you read and take action today!
