Feb. 13, 2026 is Two-Brain Day—the 10th anniversary of Two-Brain Business.
Ten years ago, I launched Two-Brain Business with 52 gym owners who believed in the vision:
Make a plan, make a system, make a profit, and make it home in time for dinner with your family.
But the story starts before 2016. To truly understand Two-Brain, you need to know where it came from and why it exists.
The Prehistory: 2005–2009
2005: Opening the Gym
I was intrigued by business long before I opened a gym. But when I actually opened in 2005, I didn’t understand business at all. I thought being the best trainer in town would be enough.
It wasn’t.
We have to be optimistic to open a business. But, very quickly, we have to be realistic: the skills we think we have are not enough.
2008: Rock Bottom
By 2008, I had two gyms and no money. No operating cash flow. Two leases. Staff to pay. I was missing my own paychecks and looking for part-time jobs in the newspaper.
I couldn’t find a single example of someone who had built a long-term, successful career in fitness. There were no books. No models. No mentors.
I was ready to quit.
Mentorship and Content Creation: 2009-2015
2009: Finding the Mentor and Starting the Blog
By luck, I found a mentor outside the fitness industry. That mattered. Nobody in fitness could show me the path.
The first book he gave me was “The E-Myth.” I broke my gym down into roles and checklists. I documented everything. I hired based on checklists. I stopped making things up every day.
To learn, I translated everything into my own words. I started writing a blog as a love letter to future me.
I called it “Don’t Buy Ads” because my mentor told me I had systems problems, not marketing problems. Bringing more people into a broken gym just doesn’t make sense.
On June 9, 2009, I published my first post to help other gym owners.
I tested everything I posted about. If it worked, I shared it. If it didn’t, I said so.
2012: The First Seminar
In 2012, gym owners asked me to speak in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was terrified.
I self-published 30 copies of my blog posts and called it “Two-Brain Business.”
I spoke between Ben Bergeron and a franchise owner. Nobody knew who I was. Most books were left behind.
But my desire to help gym owners beat my fear.
That same year, I started doing dozens of free calls every month and many paid ones.
2012–2013: Working With 321GoProject
I partnered with a website company whose clients needed more than websites. We did low-cost mentorship together.
That’s when I realized every gym had the same problems.
2013: CrossFit Takes Notice
CrossFit published my business content in the CrossFit Journal. Gym owners worldwide reached out. The problems were universal—cash flow, retention, hiring, time.
Everyone was wrestling with the same issues alone. I realized that if I could find “the right answer,” more gyms would thrive and the fitness industry would take a great leap forward.
2014: Writing Two Books Simultaneously
By 2014, I knew gym problems fell into two buckets: marketing/sales and systems/operations.
I wrote “Help First” and “Two-Brain Business 2.0” simultaneously. “Help First” resonated deeply with the community because it reframed marketing and sales as coaching. Great coaches who hated selling suddenly had a plan for “slime-free sales.”
I kept running seminars and making more connections in the community.
2015: The Failed Course and the Decision
I launched a business course. It failed.
The lesson was critical: Gym owners don’t need more information—they need help applying the right information to their situation. That insight became the foundation of Two-Brain Business.
The pivot back to one-on-one mentorship caused friction at the company where I was working—enough friction that I decided to go out on my own.
Two-Brain Business: 2016-2026
2016: Two-Brain Day—The Official Launch
On Feb. 13, 2016, I launched twobrainbusiness.com with one-on-one mentorship and 52 gyms.
Later that year, after working with Dan Martell, I launched the Two-Brain Summit to provide problem solving, not motivation.
2017: Building the Team
To help more gym owners faster, I trained my first mentors.
We moved the quickly growing summit to CrossFit Illumine in Niles, Illinois. Dave Tate came and spoke. I met John Franklin in person there for the first time.
I also spoke at CrossFit HQ at a free seminar for about 40 local gym owners. That was surreal—standing in the place where CrossFit started, talking about business.
2018: Scaling, Expanding and the “State of the Industry”
As Two-Brain evolved and expanded to serve about 300 gyms, I realized fitness entrepreneurs needed different advice at different stages. Free advice online wasn’t sorted. I wrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” to help gym owners focus on the right things at the right time.
Inside the business, we formalized mentor training, built the team to 12 and added European mentors.
When CrossFit HQ invited us to come out and teach a seminar, I flew people in from across the world—including some of the mentors on the team. We did this for free, and it cost us tens of thousands of dollars. We had about 30 or 40 gym owners in the room for a two-day seminar. We taught them everything.
The pitch to us: “This is a test. We want a CrossFit Level 1 for business. We want you to deliver it. This is the trial.”
So we did it, and we heard nothing. This was part of my ongoing challenge with CrossFit for a decade. I finally grasped the point that I worked for CrossFit affiliates but would never work for CrossFit HQ. And I was fine with that.
I ended my tenure writing for CrossFit when the media team cutbacks began, and I hired the head of the CrossFit Journal, Mike Warkentin, to work for Two-Brain when he was downsized.
In conversation with top CrossFit execs, I was asked this: “What’s the No. 1 thing we can do to help affiliates without explicitly saying ‘here’s the playbook’?”
I said, “The best thing you can do is collect data from all of them and just publish it.”
COO Bruce Edwards said—and I’ll never forget this—”That’s a great idea. We’re never gonna do it.”
I was immediately depressed, but within 24 hours I realized Two-Brain was working with 300 affiliates and had maybe 7,000 people reading our daily emails.
So we started our “State of the Industry” research and got data from about 700 gyms. It wasn’t representative of the entire industry, but it was way better than anything else. A lot of people loved it, and they started making decisions based on it.
Data changed everything.
2019: Growth and Evolution
We expanded payment-provider partnerships for better data, and we dug deep to get more proof. As we did, it became easier and easier to say, “This works. This doesn’t.”
That clarity was reflected in the incredible results our clients got. Gym owners who followed the plan got better results in one year than I did after a decade of trial and error.
We refined mentor training further to help our team members help gym owners get results even faster.
The summit was so popular that we had to move it to a larger venue in Chicago.
2020: The Lockdowns
I published “Gym Owners Handbook”—and then the world shut down.
Suddenly, gym owners were living through the worst crisis in the history of the fitness industry.
To help, we launched gymownersunited.com and published daily briefs at 4 a.m., seven days a week.
The summit went virtual to help gym owners with peer support when many couldn’t even unlock their doors to coach.
Gyms with systems and support survived 2020—and many thrived as pandemic restrictions were slowly lifted.
2021: Hope and Resilience
With the pandemic still lingering, the summit stayed virtual. Speakers included Jocko Willink, Lisa Nichols and Todd Herman.
Our Mentor Training program became renowned worldwide as the standard for licensing professional mentors.
2022: Supporting New Founders
I published “Start a Gym” and launched startagym.com for Founder Phase owners because different stages require different strategies.
2023: Simplifying Success
I published “The Simple Six” so gym owners could focus on the only six metrics that really matter.
Clarity beat complexity.
2024: The Millionaire Vision
I published “Millionaire Gym Owner” for gym owners in the Tinker Phase—the ones who had built successful gyms and were ready to build wealth.
I also published “The Golden Hour” and launched the Golden Hour Challenge to help gym owners reclaim their time and use it to work on the stuff that actually matters.
The Summit sold out at 1,000 seats!
2025: Returning to Fundamentals
I published “Help Best,” a return to the fundamentals of marketing and serving clients.
The summit sold out at 1,000 seats again—we had found our rhythm.
2026: Coming Full Circle
This year, I moved out of the CEO role to get back to what I like best: creating content to help gym owners. Stay tuned.
To scale up, we’re moving the summit to the Hyatt in Rosemont, and Mike Michalowicz is our headliner this year.
I’ll be giving the keynote, and I can’t wait to see your face in the crowd. (Some tickets are still available here if you move fast.)
What We’ve Learned in 10 Years
Over 10 years, we’ve collected the solutions for every problem in the gym business.
We’ve learned that most gym owners need to fix themselves before they can fix their business. That’s why we focus so heavily on self-leadership.
We’ve learned that gym owners don’t need more information—they need someone to help them apply the right information to their specific situation. That’s why one-on-one mentorship works.
We’ve learned that different stages of business require different strategies. A new gym owner has different needs than someone who’s been running a profitable gym for five years. That’s why we created distinct programs for Founders, Farmers and Tinkers.
We’ve learned that community matters. Gym owners who surround themselves with other successful gym owners grow faster and avoid more mistakes. That’s why the summit exists.
And we’ve learned that this work matters. Every gym owner we help is changing lives in their community. When you succeed, your clients succeed. When your clients succeed, their families succeed. The ripple effect is enormous.
Looking Forward
Ten years in, I’m more excited about this work than ever.
We have mentors around the world helping gym owners every single day. We have systems that work. We have data that proves what works and what doesn’t. And we have a community of gym owners who are building businesses they’re proud of—businesses that serve their families and their communities.
The next 10 years will be about deepening that impact. We’ll continue to refine our systems. We’ll continue to train world-class mentors. And we’ll continue to bring gym owners together at the summit.
If you’re reading this and you’re struggling with your gym—whether it’s cash flow, client retention, hiring, marketing, time management or anything else—I want you to know that the solution exists. We’ve been collecting these solutions for 10 years.
Book a call. Let’s figure out what you need. Let’s solve your specific problem.
And if you’re already working with us, I can’t wait to see what you do in the next decade. Lean on your mentor, do the work and get home for dinner with your family. You can literally change the world with your business.
Thank you for 10 years. Here’s to the next 10.
