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Solving The Icon Problem

The following is adapted from Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief.   When you first start a business, you are the face of your company. But eventually, your business grows and you need to phase yourself out of the starter jobs. The first hurdle in replacing yourself in any role is to solve the icon problem.  Give Your Clients Appealing Substitutes As the figurehead for your business, clients expect to see you in every position and view your staff only as substitutes of lesser value.    For example:   Athletes ask which classes you’ll be coaching and book around those times. Clients aren’t willing to do some of their training sessions with another trainer. “When will Chris be back?” is a common question in the gym. Members text you, saying, “It’s not the same when you’re not here.”   These are flattering at first. You feel loved and irreplaceable. But don’t fall into the trap. How will you ever take a week off without your business struggling? How can you ever sell your gym or move on to a higher-value role or make the time to improve your business? If clients are disappointed when you’re not around all the time, you’re an icon. That’s a problem.   “My clients think I’m their personal servant!” Have you heard that one before?   “They think I can just drop everything and listen to their little dramas!” I’ve been there.   “They think I just drink coffee and surf the internet when I’m not coaching!” Been there too.   When I finally realized that a stable income meant working ON my business, not IN it, I struggled to separate myself from the day-to-day stuff. I wrote blog posts and read articles while sitting at the front desk of my gym. Clients felt like I was ignoring them. When I expanded and put in a small office, they’d knock and ask why I was “hiding” in ...
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Two-Brain Radio With Sean Woodland, Episode 6: Craig Howard

Sean: 00:00 – Hi everybody. Welcome to another edition of Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland. On today’s episode I sit down with Craig Howard. Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. For free business tips and advice, you can sign up for our mailing list at twobrainbusiness.com. Craig Howard is a two- time CrossFit Games competitor in the masters division and he won the 50-to-54-year-old division in 2013. He is also the owner of Diablo CrossFit in Pleasant Hill, California, an affiliate that is in its 13th year of operation. I talked with Craig about the keys to competing and training as a masters athlete, how he started and then grew Diablo CrossFit and how his gym has managed to send nearly 60 people to the CrossFit Games. Thanks for listening everybody. Sean: 00:53 – Craig, how are you doing today, man, thanks for being here. Craig: 00:54 – Good Sean. Thanks for driving up by the way. Sean: 00:57 – It’s my pleasure. My pleasure. Yeah, it’s always fun dealing with Bay-area traffic, but I got a little bit lucky it wasn’t that bad. First question that I always like to ask people is how did you find CrossFit? Craig: 01:07 – I found it through a Men’s Journal article that talked about the best online fitness programs and they labeled CrossFit as the hardest online workout that you will ever do, and the workout that they listed was Murph. And at the time I was doing triathlons and push-ups and pull-ups and I said I want to try that. And I went out and literally within two days, I did that workout and I honestly think I gave myself rhabdo. Sean: 01:35 – Did you go like old-school straight through? Craig: 01:39 – Yeah, straight through and, you know, I started out 10, my pull-ups was like 10, 10, eight, five, three and ...
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How The Best Advice Gets Better (And Why Bad Advice Sticks Around)

Two-Brain Business is the bestselling fitness business book in history. And some days, I think about pulling it off the shelves.   There are over 120 actionable steps you can take in that book. Dozens of people have told me “it saved my business!”. Thousands have read it, and then booked a free call with a Two-Brain certified mentor. Hundreds have leveled up in our mentorship program called the Incubator.   But there are three things I wish I could update in that book. Because the best advice evolves over time. Here’s how:   Gyms who seek mentorship from Two-Brain business are taught to track the metrics that matter. This helps gym owners see what’s working, and what’s not. Then they can make changes and grow, or double down on the things getting them results. And sometimes, their results are better than mine ever were.   Gasp!   When one gym owner raised her rates without losing a single client, we tested her strategy in a few other gyms. The results–measured by data–were amazing, and so we replaced my strategy with hers. A few months later, when another gym owner made one small change that improved his retention–measured by data–we upgraded again.   In fact, if you went through the Incubator four years ago, and went through it again now, you’d probably see a LOT of difference. That’s because the best advice evolves.   But if you’re not tracking success, it can’t evolve. Because without data, everything is a guess.   It’s pretty hard for a new idea to make the cut into the Two-Brain Incubator now. That’s because the actions we take in the Incubator are time-tested and proven. But we’re always looking at the outliers. For example, one gym owner just finished the Incubator with an ARM of $495 (that’s an average client revenue of $495 per month). Another gym owner just sold $50,000 in personal training in ...
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Two-Brain Marketing Episode 15: Dr. Ashley Mak

Mateo: 00:03 – Hey it’s Mateo from Two-Brain Marketing. On this edition of the Two-Brain Marketing podcast, I’m talking to Doctor Ashley Mak from Hudson River Fitness. It is a very special episode because Ashley and I are actually business partners. We own the gym together, so you’ll hear about the ads that I personally run for the gym and you’ll learn how last year we spent around $17,000 on ads and generated close to $90,000 in front-end revenue. 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: 00:33 – 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: 00:56 – This episode is brought to you by Incite Tax. Incite Tax is founded by John Briggs, a CrossFitter, a great big tall guy with a fantastic sense of humor and John is like a coach for your books. These guys are not just pencil-pushing number crunchers. These guys will actually help you get towards your Perfect Day. If you’re a member of our Growth stage part of the mentoring program, you’re familiar with John’s videos on 1099 versus W2 contractors. See John used to work for the IRS. He’s seen the other side of labor law and he knows exactly where the line is drawn. Don’t believe everything you read, but on the tax side, John can actually help you plan to take home more money every year and save more money on taxes because John is a certified Profit-First accountant. If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that I’m a big fan of Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First system and ...
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The Clogs In Your Funnel (And How To Kill Them)

Your ads probably aren’t the problem.   If you have new leads clicking through your ads and taking the next step, then your ads are working just fine.   When we see reports like this from a client, we know there’s a clog in the funnel:   Ad spend: $100 NSI booked: 12 NSI show rate: 0 FER: 0   This means 12 people saw your ad, and liked it enough to quit social media. They went to your appointment calendar and made a commitment. None of them made that commitment lightly. None of them decided to waste your time. In fact, at that moment, they were firmly committed to showing up and hearing about your business.   Then something stopped them.   Maybe they went to your website and saw something completely different from your ad.   Maybe they looked at you on Facebook and saw the ripped-hands pictures.   Maybe they saw your rates without context.   Maybe they saw pictures of your gym and thought, “Uh…nah.”   Or maybe they booked the appointment, showed up–and something told them “this is NOT what I expected.”   Their mental model didn’t match what they saw. This is called cognitive dissonance.   They went from a professional ad to a dingy dungeon of a gym.   They read your promise of a caring culture and saw your sweaty shirt hanging in your office.   They expected one thing, and saw something completely different. In other words, you failed to live up to your promise before they even did their first squat.   The reason we track metrics in our Two-Brain Marketing mentorship program is because we want to find the clogs in your funnel. In our above example: Ad spend: $100 NSI booked: 12 NSI show rate: 0 FER: 0 …there’s obviously a problem occurring between the time a potential client books their No-Sweat Intro and the time they show ...
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Two-Brain Radio With Sean Woodland, Episode 5: Kirsten Pedri

Sean: 00:02 – Hi everybody, welcome to another edition of Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland. On this week’s episode I talk with two-time CrossFit Games athlete and owner of CrossFit Davis. Kirsten Pedri. Two-Brain with Sean Woodland is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. To learn more about creating your Perfect Day as an entrepreneur, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com. Kirsten Pedri has competed at the CrossFit Games as an individual, that was in 2017, and as a master the following year in 2018. She joined me on the phone to talk about her long road to the Games, what motivated her to become a gym owner and what it’s like to train her 99-year-old grandmother. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Sean: 00:48 – Kirsten, thanks so much for joining me today. How are things going there in Davis? Kirsten: 00:54 – Things are going great, it’s real hot. Sean: 00:56 – Yeah, it’s that time of year now, man. Those Sacramento Davis summers are not fun. Kirsten: 01:02 – It’s getting hot. It’s critical we have AC in the gym. Sean: 01:04 – That’s certainly helps when you have a hundred-degree weather to deal with. But it’s a dry heat at least. Let’s start by talking about you. How did you first find CrossFit? Kirsten: 01:17 – I found CrossFit, actually I was babysitting for somebody at the time and she knew the person who had owned CrossFit Davis originally, and she mentioned, you know, you should give us a try and I think you’d really like it. And so I went and tried it, and sure enough for whatever reason kept going back, and it was so hard the first time. And then, you know, I mean, it’s funny, I think back to that, and actually my entire life changed from that moment, you know what I mean? ...
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