On Saturday night, I got the text I’d been dreading: “Coop, I think I have it.” It didn’t come from a gym owner in the Two-Brain family, so I knew he was flying without a net. I remembered, as a new gym owner, driving in crazy whiteouts or teetering on shaky ladders and thinking, “You know, if I go down here my family is screwed.” My early partners insisted I take out “key shareholder insurance” in case I ever got sick. But I secretly cancelled it because the business couldn’t afford it. (As if it could afford for me to get sick.) So it wasn’t hard for me to put myself in this poor guy’s shoes. Back then, I’d have had no idea what to do: My own illness would have turned a bad week into a decade of trying to recover from bankruptcy. But now I do know what to do. In the Two-Brain mentorship program, we tell owners they have to pass a “hit by a bus test.” In other words, they have to make sure their businesses can continue running if something happens to them. Of course, we give them weeks to build all the infrastructure. This guy has hours. Here’s what I told him. The Plan 1. Get tested. Maybe you have the flu. You need to measure exactly how bad things are before you take drastic measures. (At Two-Brain Business, we use the Road Test with our clients.) 2. Duplicate yourself. This took me one very long weekend. But you have to visualize yourself going through every step you take in a day. Usually, that means, “I open the door with this key and turn on the lights with the switch located here.” But right now that means, “I open my laptop at 5 a.m. I access my client list and open up the group programming WOD.”The next step is to write down instructions for ...
Read More →
