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What's The Risk Worth?

I don’t often tell someone NOT to open a gym, but I did last month.   James coaches at a box now. He doesn’t have many classes. But the owner lets him keep 100% of the personal training revenue he generates, and he does a dozen PT sessions every week, netting him around $3600 per month.   He wants to open his own gym. But he didn’t realize that he’s probably making more than the owner; that he has zero expenses, zero stress, and all the time he wants. When I asked him for an income goal, he said “sixty thousand dollars a year.” He could do that one of two ways:   Open a gym, take the largest loan of his life, stress over client recruitment, stress over injury, work from 5am-9pm for a year or so, fight with his wife, drive himself crazy with programming, and find an unsympathetic ear in an online Facebook group. To profit $3600 per month, he’ll have to generate over $11,000 in gross revenue, minimum. Then he’ll have to find other coaches to help him; keep them inspired; try to track the Kill Cliff purchases out of the fridge, and then fight distraction through his workouts. OR… Get three more clients and stay where he is.   The owner of his gym is crazy for giving him 100% of personal training revenue. After all, the owner is in the fitness business, not just the group training business. Turning over an important revenue stream is like letting a hot dog vendor push his cart around inside your restaurant.   But the owner wasn’t on the phone; the trainer was. So my advice was “Don’t quit your day job.”   What if the owner had been on the phone? Because if you’re reading this, you’re probably the owner of a gym, or the founder of a service business. Here’s what we teach you in the ...
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Episode 126: Q+A With Coop

 
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The Three Things You NEED To Have In Your Gym Business

My first book about the gym industry, Two-Brain Business, is now over six years old.  It just sold its 20,000th copy (thanks!) and its sequel, the more tactical Two-Brian Business 2.0, now finds its way to more than 10 gym owners every day. When I wrote the original, I included a list of 30 ideas for additional revenue streams. I had tested more than half myself, and seen the rest used successfully in different gyms. There were no wild guesses on that list. But the list was WAY too long–on purpose. When I wrote the book, gyms were increasingly narrowing their offerings to one: group classes. It was an obvious (and potentially fatal) mistake, and no one else was saying “this doesn’t work.” So I said the opposite: that diverse revenue streams not only increased revenue, but kept people around longer. It worked by giving people what they wanted instead of trying to cram the public through one little keyhole. Picture our service offerings on a spectrum. On the left side of the spectrum are the gyms selling group classes only. On the right side of the spectrum are gyms selling CrossFit, personal training, nutrition, HIIT, Zumba, spin, and 15 other things in 200 different combinations. In 2012, the left side was so heavy that it threatened to upset the whole table. So I took the opposite stance to pull people back to center. The “list of 30 ideas” did NOT mean “You should run 30 programs in your gym at one time.” It did mean, “You need novelty and diversity, and you should let your clients determine what you sell them.” Now that the majority of gym owners sell more than one service, it’s time to bring the balance back to center again. In the Founder Phase of gym ownership, you need to be really, really good at selling your core services. Your core service is fitness. Fitness is ...
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Episode 125: How To Retire

 
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Episode 124: Two-Brain Marketing

  Speaker 1 (00:00:01):You’re listening to, to brain radio. We make gyms profitable, getting you on track to making every day your perfect day. Every week we’ll deliver top shelf business tactics to help improve your gym, advance your fitness career, and move you closer to well get ready to start building your bigger and better business with your coats. Best selling fitness, author of to brain business, grow your gym and help first risks Cooper.Speaker 2 (00:00:29):All right, everyone. I’m here today with John Franklin and Mateo Lopez from to brand marketing. These guys are gonna walk us through a huge overview of what’s currently going on in the marketing world for gyms. Now these guys have been there, I unless you tell your own story guys, but we’re going to get into some pretty deep questions and I’m going to ask some pretty hard questions to so hope you’re ready. All right, so John, we’re gonna start with you like tell me the story of your gms and, and what brought you to this point. Hey guys, on the job.Speaker 3 (00:00:56):Franklin, a little bit about me. Flip side. My partner, Mateo, started in a park in Hoboken, New Jersey in 2014 with the EU set of Walmart cowgirls. It was just like a simple meetup group was like, hey, come try crossfit. We ended up renting a warehouse a right by that park and um, we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time. We ended up having a little bit over a hundred members in our first three months of operation. And uh, from there we use that success to leverage a second location in New York City because a, I don’t know how familiar you guys are with Hoboken or, uh, New York. It’s tough to expand. You just can’t like rent 5,000 more square feet. So just the way you ...
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Your Coaches Aren’t Salespeople

“If I pay them more, they’ll act differently and that will bring people in.” “If I give them a commission, they’ll go bring people in.” “If I give them a percentage of PT revenue, they’ll be motivated to keep people around longer.” “If I give them a percentage of the gym, they’ll have skin in the game and we’ll make more money” No. None of that will happen. The last one was a popular myth in 2008 but was widely discarded by 2010 (although some owners took such a bad hit from the idea that they’re still doing the “walk of shame” in 2018). Many gym owners believe these statements, because they wish they were true. The owner doesn’t want to feel like a salesperson or accept responsibility for bringing in new members. So they abdicate that responsibility—and happily.  “Well, I don’t know how to do it…but if I pay my COACHES to do it, it’s their fault—not mine!” Who will teach the coaches how to “bring people in”? Because it’s not a matter of incentive—no one has more incentive than the box owner. Let’s deal with the myths individually:  1. “I want to pay my coaches a bit more per class so they’ll act more professionally.” You can insert “take out the garbage” or “call missing clients” or “make better warmups” at the end of that sentence. Here’s the thing: If an extra $5 per class is what they need to “flip the switch,” then you have a staffing problem. Their performance and their pay are separate issues. Imagine a baseball player says, “I’ll only hit 25 home runs this year unless you pay me more.” That doesn’t happen because a true professional negotiates off the field and performs at the best level on the field no matter what. 2. “If I pay them a commission for new athletes they bring in—they’ll bring people in!” First, new athletes aren’t going ...
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