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Engaging Your Staff

by Anastasia Bennett, TwoBrain Mentor   Why are some members of your team more engaged than others? This is such a good question to discuss and it comes up very often on my mentoring calls.   In fact, this is the main reason I got a mentor for my own business. I thought the problems in my business were because of my team. But I was wrong: the problem was not my team, but my leadership.   Everything a leader does has a huge impact on the team performance and their engagement.   “Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.” ― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win   As a business owner, you are the leader and you are in charge of everything. It is your job to take responsibility for your own actions and to lead by example. If your team is disengaged, or they use an “I have another full time job” excuse, it’s on you. You have not done what it takes to get your team motivated.   What does engaged mean?   Engaged = motivated   Being fully engaged in your workplace means they are professionally happy; they have a defined role that outlines what their responsibilities and expectations are; they actively contribute to the team; and they are continuously working on their self development.   Why is it so important for us to have engaged staff? Customer satisfaction   Conversion Retention Profitability Productivity   As a manager/owner you have a huge influence on your team and how they are performing.   How do you keep your team motivated?   Have defined roles, clear expectations and pathways to show them opportunities for personal growth; Show them that you care: Share your WHY with them, your vision ...
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The Problem With "Balance"

“Part of this balanced breakfast!”   What memory does that stir up?   For me, it’s something from 35 years ago: little Chris in his Transformer pajamas, eating his Frosted Flakes and watching The Smurfs.   In those days, as now, sugary cereals marketed to kids when they were at their most vulnerable. And they got their ads past the censors by using confusing language. They couldn’t say “healthy” or even “good” breakfast, so they used another term: balanced. And, over time, we all started to believe that “balanced” meant “good”.   Balance doesn’t mean equality; it doesn’t mean tolerance. It sometimes means “as much evil as good” or “just enough of X to justify all that harmful Y.” It’s worth noting that healthy food producers don’t have to talk about “balance”, because they can legitimately say “good”.   Our duty as coaches is to help our clients reach health and fitness–not to help them reach “balance”.   My role as mentor to fitness business owners is to help them achieve wealth. That means, instead of presenting all possible opinions, I serve as a filter. I fight infobesity (thanks Brendon). I don’t want to overwhelm or paralyze; I want to activate.   There are a lot of fake gurus and consultants out there who would love to sell you something. But a sales platform requires some authority, and authority requires a platform. Credible platforms take a long time to build (it’s taken me over ten years.) So they get themselves booked on podcasts or published on websites as a shortcut. Listeners tune in to hear a balanced perspective. And their misinformation blunts our collective progress.   Let me give you a more specific example: the best way to sell supplements is to show them beside steroids.   You might not have fallen for this, but I have: as a new trainer in the late 90s, I saw ads for spray-on ...
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Why I Started TwoBrain

Last week, I told you why I started a gym: to create freedom for my family.   Today, I’d like to introduce you to my larger family.   Years ago, a physiotherapist told me, “If you care about your health, then you have to care about the health of the people around you. And if you care about their health, then you have to care about the city.”   I started the gym to take care of my family, and help my wife achieve her goal at the same time. But I started TwoBrain to help my larger family: other first-time entrepreneurs who had opened a gym. I knew what they were going through, and the camaraderie of the early days of CrossFit affiliation encouraged me to share all the mistakes I’d made.   You’ve probably heard the story ad nauseam: I hit bottom, found a mentor. Posted the mentor’s lessons on a blog called DontBuyAds.com every day for four years. Answered a call to mentor a couple of gym owners through a website company. Published three books about gym ownership, added a few dozen videos and articles to the CrossFit Journal, and continued to publish love letters to gym owners every day.   But the story I haven’t told is why I founded TwoBrainBusiness.com; why we keep producing free stuff every single day; and why I’m more committed than ever before.   In early 2015, while still mentoring gyms through a website company, I built a 14-hour online course around the conversations I’d been having. While every gym is different, certain work has to precede other work, and I recorded videos, wrote lessons and built templates around these foundations. I was the guy on the videos and the guy behind the lessons. I thought we could help more gym owners by selling the video course for less. And with a waiting list, selling a course as an alternative to ...
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Episode 155: The Intramural Open

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Lead Magnet Success Quickstart Guide Part 3 FINALE!

This week’s edition of Marketing Monday will be a follow up to last week’s lesson on lead magnets. If you didn’t get a chance to check out Part 1 or Part 2, CLICK HERE for Part 1 or CLICK HERE for Part 2 to catch up! Otherwise, keep reading… We’ve been learning a lot about Lead Magnets.  We learned that the first step to generating more leads is – you need to have something on your website that entices people into opting-in and that get’s the conversation started. Next, we talked about how you can generate opt-ins for free by simply posting on your business’s Facebook page. In this week’s video, you’ll learn how to expedite the lead generation process and how you can 3x your opt-in rate with paid client attraction and lead magnets.
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Why I Started A Gym

At TwoBrain, we teach that successful entrepreneurship creates freedom. Freedom means the ability to choose: will I coach classes today, or not? Will I sleep in, or get up early? Will I mop the floors, or will someone else do it?   But successful entrepreneurship also means freedom for the people you care about most.   I opened a gym because I had to. I wasn’t under the impression that it would be easy, and I didn’t even have the CrossFit brand to lean on.   In 2005, I was a personal trainer at a small facility. I worked with 6-12 clients every day, one on one. I was paid around $20 per hour. Go ahead and do the math. My wife, Robin, had a great job. She loved her company and she was paid around 3x what I was. She liked her coworkers and she liked driving new cars around every day.   Then we had Avery. And built a new house out in the country. Life went from great too amazing. And then, when Avery turned one, it got really tough.   In Canada, new moms take a full year off work. And after a year, Robin went back to work. She struggled. I struggled too: I cried when I dropped Avery off at daycare, because she was a shy baby. One month after her return to work, Robin said: “I just want to be home with her.” And I realized that I wanted the same thing.   The problem was money: I didn’t make enough. After one 13-hour day without a break from coaching, I added up my share of the revenue and realized it wasn’t enough. I had no choice but to start my own business.   Keeping one partner home is expensive, but it also meant I could work 80 hours outside the home while she worked in our home. We both understood what was ...
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