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How do we measure business success?   For CrossFit coaches, measuring fitness is easy: it’s improved capacity across broad time and modal domains (the ten elements). Are you getting stronger, faster or more flexible? Your fitness is improving. But until Greg created a formal definition of fitness, we were unable to measure the effect of our training. It seems funny to say now, but until CrossFit, we were all selling a moving target.   Likewise, business success must be reduced to its core elements before it can be measured. The intangibles–helping our clients, saving lives, reducing body fat and associated health risks–these are the elements of coaching, not business. I’ll wait for someone else to make “good coaching” measurable, observable and repeatable in more than an empirical form.   My job is to make gyms profitable. And that means starting with a simple definition of success.   Your idea of success is different from mine. After 22 years of coaching, I’m no longer jumping for joy at the 5am class. But we can all agree that financial success is measured by profit, and lifestyle success is measured by choice: the freedom to choose how we spend our time.   With those two variables in mind, the master equation for success in any single business is this:     $ (profit) over T (time).   I’ve written extensively about valuing your time, moving to high-value roles in your business, and even the “retirement” point, where your business runs autonomously. There are many different variations of business success, but my role as mentor is to get each entrepreneur to their “Perfect day”. Let’s consider three sample cases. Each of these was recently on a call with me to discuss the path to better business.   Case #1: $1,000,000 gross revenue; 10% profit margin; 12-hour workday (plus Saturday) Case #2: $600,000 gross revenue; 25% profit margin; 12-hour workday (weekends off) Case #3: $300,000 ...

Last year a local high school built a new football field.   Football isn’t our primary sport in Canada, but the local competition is fierce, and we get just as excited about it. So the new football field included a bit more seating, and a huge scoreboard. You can clearly see the scoreboard from the highway if you’re just driving by.   The team had a losing season; the larger scoreboard didn’t help. That’s obvious. But the larger scoreboard also failed to draw more fans to the game. If you’re running a volunteer football team, that probably doesn’t matter. If you’re running a for-profit gym, that matters a lot.   In 2016, I was approached by Polar to test their new score boarding software. After their break with OrangeTheory, Polar wanted to sell their technology to other gym chains, and the TwoBrain family appealed to them as a “tip-of-the-spear” group of owners. We set up their heart rate scoreboard in the gym, with predictable results: clients looked at the screen during the workouts, thought it was “cool” for awhile, and then went back to their WOD scores. I was disappointed: the tech is colorful, syncs easily and creates the opportunity to sell chest straps to clients.   Then I had a conversation with Ray from UpCoach about heart rate testing. A local gymnastics club asked him to test VO2max on their athletes. He replied, “How will the results of the test change your training program?” They didn’t have an answer. His suggestion was to avoid testing anything unless you were prepared to make changes afterward.   Before adopting a heart rate scoreboard in their gym, I think there are two bigger questions that coaches and owners need to ask:   Coaches: “Will I change our programming based on the results I collect from this new data?” (assuming you’re collecting data and using that to determine future programming, of course.)   ...