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Two-Brain Radio: Steph Chung

Sean: 00:01 – Hi everybody and welcome to another edition of Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland. On today’s episode I speak with former CrossFit Games athlete and current coach at Invictus Fenway Steph Chung. First: Are you a stressed business owner who’s working too much and still struggling to make a profit? Do you want to grow your venture and reach the next level? Two-Brain business is here to help with a free 60-minute call. It’s not a sales pitch; it’s just an opportunity for you to get real, actionable advice from an expert who’s built a successful business. For one-on-one guidance on how to take your business to the next level, book your Free Help call today at twobrainbusiness.com. Steph Chung made her CrossFit Games debut in 2018 when she finished 35th overall. She’s also a three-time Meridian Regional athlete, and Steph has a pretty remarkable CrossFit journey that has taken her to the Middle East and now back home to Boston. We talk about her outstanding achievements attending Cornell University, how she taught pre-medical biology in Qatar and what the CrossFit community is like in the Middle East. Thanks for listening everyone. Steph, how you doing? Thank you so much for being here today. Steph: 01:16 – I’m so good. Thank you for having me. Sean: 01:18 – The first question I have for you before we get into anything is how is your dog doing? Steph: 01:23 – Oh, that’s a great question to open with. She is wonderful. I actually don’t know where she—she’s usually right by my side, but I think she’s sleeping somewhere. She’s doing really well. Sean: 01:30 – What kind of dog is she? Steph: 01:30 – She’s an Australian shepherd. Sean: 01:33 – How long have you had her? Steph: 01:34 – We got her in March, in the end of March. Yeah, so she is almost a year. Her birthday ...
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To show progress as an entrepreneur, a set of stone stairs are labeled with the words Founder, Farmer and Tinker.

In and Out of Tinker Phase

“Yes! I made it across the finish line! My business is self-sustaining, I’m building my million-dollar wealth platform, and I’m never going back! My staff will never need me to step in and fix things! I’ll never run out of money! It’s all Perfect Days from now on!” —No One Every business owner eventually makes some progress. He or she takes a step forward in business. That’s not really the hard part anymore. What comes next is the hard part.   Make Fewer Mistakes After a small success, some owners will immediately take a step back again. They fix their marketing problem and then find out they don’t have enough materials or staff to fulfill all those orders. Some owners even take two steps back after their first step forward. They discover that they don’t have enough materials or staff—and they don’t have the money to get them. Or maybe they even take three steps backward: Their disappointed new clients leave! The key to success as an entrepreneur isn’t to avoid the backward steps. It’s to minimize them. When I found a mentor, I learned to take a better step forward before I had to step back again. And soon, I took two steps forward for every one step back. Then three. I noticed my new momentum. Then four, and five, and six—and then, years later, I looked around and realized I was sprinting. But that didn’t mean I would never take a step back again. When I visited my mentor, Todd Herman, in Manhattan last week, he told me this: “I read your book. You’re back in Farmer Phase.” And he was right: but this time, I was in Farmer Phase with a $7 million company instead of a $500,000 company. The stakes are higher, but the steps are the same.   Level Up In my first business, the shift from Farmer to Tinker was a “one step forward, ...
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The black and gold Two-Brain Radio podcast logo.

Two-Brain Radio: Sasha Kone

Mateo: 00:00 – Hey, it’s Mateo Lopez of Two-Brain Marketing. On this edition of the Two-Brain Marketing podcast, I’m talking with Sasha Cohen from Endless Mountains CrossFit in Pennsylvania. You’ll learn about how this mother of two who calls herself “computer illiterate” was able to generate leads for 71 cents, so you don’t want to miss this. Make sure to subscribe to Two-Brain Radio for more marketing tips and secrets each week. Greg: 00:23 – Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com. Chris: 00:48 – One of my favorite finds has been foreverfierce.com. I linked up with Matt several months ago at Forever Fierce and he had some fantastic ideas, and so he and I have put together a couple of packages that we think are really going to help CrossFit affiliates everywhere. Two-Brain mentoring clients use Matt almost exclusively. He’s got fantastic designs and he takes all the work out of it. All that time that you spend searching the internet and Pinterest and junk like that for great CrossFit T-shirts? You don’t have to do that anymore. Matt has designs for you. You can put your logo on one of his templates, which are fantastic, and your clients will never know the difference. It saves you so much time that you could be using on other things like real marketing. He’ll also go so far as to remind you when it’s time to reorder. He’ll give you suggested order sizes, he’ll help you set up pre-orders so you’re not even fronting the cash for the inventory. It’s all amazing stuff built to help affiliates and that’s why I love this guy and this company, ...
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Two gray dragons fly overtop of a castle on a hill and breathe orange flames down on it.

The Failure Fantasy

“What if it all just went away … and it wasn’t my fault?” Many entrepreneurs secretly harbor a “failure fantasy.” After making the leap from a secure job to a world of chaos, overwhelm and responsibility, they start to think about acceptable ways to bow out of ownership. Now, this might or might not be conscious. The entrepreneur would probably never say “I’d rather give up than continue.” But he or she might say something like: “I’m thinking about taking on a partner to share the load.” Or “I’m going to turn this over to my coaches. It’s all up to them now!” Or “I’m going to form a board of directors to tell me what to do!” That last one was something I considered when things got rough. I didn’t really think that my clients knew how to run a business better than I did; I just secretly wanted someone else to blame. Luckily, I didn’t have an option: My family had to eat. So I pressed on alone and found a mentor. Eventually, things got better when I took control of my business.   Lost and Listless The Failure Fantasy occurs when gym owners can’t see a clear path forward. When they think about the next two years and see only struggle and uncertainty, they ask themselves a question: “Isn’t it better to have a bit of short-term pain now—just let it all go to hell—than to draw this out for years?” And if you don’t have a path forward, it’s a valid question. If you don’t know how to solve your problems, every single one of them is going to be with you for a long time. If you lack clarity on your next step, you’re going to stub your toe in the dark. A lot. The Failure Fantasy is something an outsider would never understand. “Why would you WANT your business to fail?” And most entrepreneurs ...
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A stressed woman in a gray sweater looks up from between two stacks of books in a library.

Overwhelm

It doesn’t matter who reads the most books. That’s not the contest. The contest is “who can build a sustainable gym that pays you really well?” I’ll never tell anyone to read fewer books. I was raised by teachers. I have hundreds of books in my Audible account and hundreds more scattered between my office and my home. When I find a book I love, I buy 20 copies and hand them out to Workshop visitors. I read a for nearly three hours every single day. And it’s not enough. I still can’t read everything. So here’s what I’ve learned: When it comes to reading business books, I encourage everyone to read more intensively, not extensively. Here are my rules for reading business books:   1. Don’t Plan to Read the Whole Book Paraphrasing Nassim Taleb, “Most books would make a great blog post.” Most business books follow a new format: one central idea, some supporting evidence, and stories of the idea being put into practice. I won’t explain why here (but I write about it more on the Two-Brain Media blog). That means it’s really easy to understand the author’s point. But it also means you don’t need to read most of the book. Read the intro and then the first few chapters. If you understand the idea, you can skip to the middle of the book—or even the end. If the first few chapters make you excited to read the rest, keep going. Every chapter should sell you on the next one.   2. Don’t Pass the Halfway Point Without Action When you hit the halfway mark in a book, pause and reflect. Ask yourself: “What action have I taken since starting this book?” If the answer is “none,” put it down. This information isn’t moving you forward. If you can clearly point to an action you’ve taken or a habit you’ve created since starting the book, keep ...
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A gold mail slot in a dark wooden door with a sign that reads "no junk mail."

Permission Marketing

Email marketing works. Spam doesn’t. Good emails are part of a conversation. Good emails include things your readers care about (I call mine “love letters”). Good emails actually help your audience. Bad emails are sales pitches. Bad emails includes lots of “!!!” and “?!?!”. Bad emails are noise. Bad emails are spam. But the real difference between a great email and spam? Permission.   “I’m Listening” When people give you permission to email them, they’re not necessarily giving you money. They’re giving you something far more valuable: their attention. We spend almost $20,000 every month building amazing tools. We build them so people in our audience will know they can trust us to be valuable and relevant. Here’s a list of tools we’ve published recently, and here’s the result of all that work: 7,500 people open our emails every. single. day. Because we’re not spamming them. Because we earned their permission to send them a love letter.   No One Likes Spam Now, I get spammed a lot. I own a gym. That gym is on a list of CrossFit affiliates. That list gets scraped by hackers and sold to marketers who don’t care about permission. Then those marketers spam my gym. Here’s one from last night: Title: “New Member” Body: “Hey Catalyst Fitness, I know cold emails are about as much fun as doing burpees… .” That’s spam. I didn’t ask for help with whatever they’re selling. I also still have my chris@crossfit.com email account. That account gets spammed daily. Here are two from yesterday: “Chris, does your gym qualify for our free habits course?” (Spoiler: it doesn’t.) “Ready to teach Pilates?” (I’m not.) I built a $7 million company on the back of great content. We publish every day. We don’t spam anyone.   How to Use Email to Build Trust With Your Audience 1. Know what they actually care about. I write about gym owners because I ...
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