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The Failure Fantasy

September 8, 2019 Gym Operations
“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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Overwhelm

September 7, 2019 Personal Development
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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Permission Marketing

September 7, 2019 Gym 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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Two-Brain Radio: Your Duty to Succeed With Jeff Jucha

September 5, 2019 Gym Operations Podcast
Greg: 00:00 – It’s Greg Strauch of Two-Brain Media and on this week’s episode we’re hearing from Jeff Jucha. Now, this was originally recorded in the Two-Brain Summit of 2019 and he talks about the topic of your duty to succeed. He touches on things of how to affect the world that you want around you and the option of failure. As always, subscribe to Two-Brain Radio to hear the very best ideas, tips, and topics to move you and your business closer to wealth. 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. Greg: 00:48 – We’d like to thank one of our amazing partners, Driven Nutrition. Have you ever been asked by your members or your staff what supplements to take, when to take them and where you should get them? How about the time it takes to put in the orders and making sure you have the right amount of supplements on hand? What about your profit margins on your supplements? Do you know what they are? Are they good, even? Your time is worth something, and ordering supplements isn’t worth your time. Driven Nutrition has solved this for you. They allow you to step aside and use preorders to send to your members for all supplement orders. That way you don’t have to have extra inventory on hand and it allows your members to order the supplements when needed. They’ve created an amazing on-boarding process for new businesses to allow for quick and easy understanding of what they have to offer and true profit margins that most other supplement companies promise but never deliver. This is why I personally use Driven Nutrition within my ...
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How to Say Goodbye (For Now)

September 5, 2019 Member Retention
“It’s not you; it’s me.” Cancellations in your gym are hard to take. When you build a career around caring for 150 clients, you form tight emotional bonds. As Greg Glassman wrote in 2006: “You’ll find me at my clients’ parties, weddings and family gatherings. Indeed, I am a personal friend to nearly every one of my clients.” As much as we try to stay objective, it still hurts when a client says goodbye. Here’s how to respond to that “Dear John” letter saying “I want to cancel my membership.”   1. Express Your Concern With Specific Details “Oh Sally, I’m sorry to hear that—especially right after your recent weight loss! We’re just getting momentum!” And leave it at that. Don’t include a “but I understand” or easy way out of the conversation.   2. Remind Them What They’re Losing The fear of losing something you have is far greater than the promise of getting something good. That’s why you see all those “don’t miss out!” deals on Facebook: You don’t want to have things taken away from you. For example: When you cancel your membership, you’ll lose access to our: – 1:1 coaches – Nutrition accountability program – Goal-setting meetings – Workout-tracking app – Private members’ Facebook group And so on. Fill out your own list, starting with the most valuable part of your service. Surprisingly, I’ve had clients say, “Oh, I’ll be back in a month and don’t want to lose my data on SugarWOD. Just keep the membership going.” There’s far more value to your program than the classes you teach. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much. So remind them.   3. Make It Easy for Them to Come Back Asking the question “when do you think you’ll be back?” can help the client create a clear picture in his or her mind. If you can book a goal-setting appointment with the person in the future, ...
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Three scraps of manilla paper clipped to a clothesline read "good," "better" and "best."

The Best Time To Improve Your Gym? IT'S NOW.

September 4, 2019 Selling Gym Memberships
Yesterday, I wrote that the best time to start a gym is NOW. But what if you already own a gym? What if you’ve made mistakes–with your pricing, with your location, with discounts…? The best time to fix them is now. NOW is the best time to grow your gym. Here’s why:   1. Mistakes Are Less Fatal Now Five years ago, one or two mistakes could have killed you. Now we have antidotes. If you priced your service too low in 2012, you were probably dead. You’d fall into the trap of more members paying less money. You would work crazy hours yourself. You’d coach new clients every single week because of a high churn rate. Then you’d stop getting new clients, and that would be it. Now, if you’ve made a horrible mistakes with pricing, we know the way back. We’ve done it hundreds of times with gym owners around the world. We can walk you through the process step by step, and support you all the way. Discounts? PIFs? Lifetime memberships? All poison, but now all treatable, thanks to experience and data. We’ve got the cure for the mumps, and now we’re working to vaccinate fitness entrepreneurs to avoid these problems.   2. The Marketing Problem Has Been Solved The top question fitness entrepreneurs asked in the 1970s was still the top question they asked 40 years later: “How do I get more clients?” Now, we’ve solved that problem. We teach the step-by-step process in the Incubator. It goes like this: Fix your retention problems first Sell a valuable service, at the right price, really well Help your current people more Help the people closest to them by getting referrals (in an un-slimy way) Help the people surrounding your best clients by knowing their problems and solving them Find the people who need you on digital platforms, and market to them effectively Track every step along the ...
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