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Your K-9 Mentor

February 4, 2018 Personal Development
By Jason Williams, TwoBrain Mentor My dog is becoming my mentor. We’ve had our 6 month old pup named Belle since she was 2 months old. Since she is a lab/shephard mix, she’s unbelievably smart. Within 2 training sessions, she had learned to sit, stay, lay down, and shake. Within a month, she was able to do an obstacle course at the gym! Everything was going swimmingly, until she started growing. All the sudden, she started barking, jumping up, and ignoring commands. She still had the same personality, still super smart, still LOOKED like the dog that won “star puppy” at the SPCA training course. But she was bigger, stronger, and amped up ALL THE TIME! Something had to change. I had to take a step back and review the basics again with this bigger, stronger, super dog. So, after a long walk and some vigorous exercise, we spent an afternoon working again on sit, stay, lay down, and shake. By the end, she not only had those things down, but my 6 year old could tell her to do them! And since then, she’s been much more responsive and much more well-behaved. The process taught me something I applied immediately to my business. Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forward… That means things like writing your roles and tasks, reviewing your intake process, or revisiting your perfect day. For me, this meant redefining my roles and tasks, and making sure I had the right people in the right seats. This made a HUGE difference in the productivity and morale of the team. Taking this step back doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You got to where you are NOW based on what you knew THEN. But that won’t get you where you want to be NEXT. If you ignore this, you may find yourself building your business on a shaky foundation of ideas you sorta implemented and ...
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What Comes First: Marketing or Mentorship?

February 3, 2018 Gym Marketing
When you break your day down into the roles you fill at the gym, how much time do you spend marketing?   If marketing is ALL of your time, you’re a marketer. But if marketing is only SOME of your time, you’re a business owner.   Specialists (marketers) work for generalists (business owners) because your business is SO much larger than the marketing piece.   As I wrote yesterday in “The Curse of the Lottery Winner“, marketing takes on disproportionate importance when you don’t have money. But when it works, and you HAVE money, do all your problems disappear? Of course not.   I’ve done this broke, and I’ve done it with a lot of money in my account. Having money is better than not. But the way your business is set up to handle new leads; the way your staff is compensated; the way your clients are retained–and even the type of marketing you do–are far bigger questions than “How do I build a Facebook ad?”   Five years ago, Facebook wasn’t the most popular platform in the world for advertising. Five years from now, it will no longer be. What then?   (Your mentor will know the answer.)
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The Lottery Winner's Curse

February 2, 2018 Gym Operations
In 2002, Jack Whittaker won $315 million in a Powerball jackpot. Within a decade, his daughter and granddaughter had died of drug overdoses, his wife had divorced him, and he had been sued several times. Once he was robbed of $545,000 in cash that had been sitting in his car while he visited a strip club. When interviewed after the robbery, he sobbed to reporters, “I wish I’d torn that ticket up.” Every picture of every lottery winner is the same: big teeth, blown-up check, clean slate. The winner is thinking, “All of my past mistakes are erased. I’m out of debt. I have a clean slate. I can do anything I want. I won. I’ll be a winner forever.” But pictures of lottery winners taken three years later show the opposite story: more than half are broke. Nearly 50% get divorced. And almost none of them are smiling. Money didn’t solve their problems. More than anything else, money just poured jet fuel on their problems. Here are ten more examples out of thousands. As my friend Jarret Perelmutter once told me, “Nobody cares about money until they don’t have any. Then it’s ALL they care about.” Many lottery tickets are sold to people who don’t have money. What does this have to do with CrossFit gyms? Well, there are a host of new “marketing consultants” out there. And many of their programs generate revenue. The gyms who are most likely to sign up for their services are those in triage: they need money NOW or face bankruptcy. And, thankfully, sometimes they GET the money to keep going. Does that solve their long-term problems? No. Clients upset about “bait-and-switch” tactics leave horrible reviews on Google. High turnover rates mean gyms owners must always recruit at a high rate, even when ad prices rise (and what happens when Facebook is replaced by the next platform?) Coaches struggle under the sales pressure. ...
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The Scariest Answer We Hear

February 1, 2018 Gym Operations
We’ve been running our Gym Checkup for two years. Thousands of gym owners have completed it. Most finish the checkup and book a free call with me to discuss their answers. Sometimes we invite those callers to mentorship. Some of these guys are generating over a million in gross revenue per year. Some are looking for a lifeline to make it through the month. Most are in the middle. But almost ALL gyms, rich or poor, give us this answer on at least one of the questions in the Checkup: “I don’t know.” “I don’t know my goal for this business. I haven’t really thought about it.” “I don’t know how long a client stays with me.” “I don’t know what my coaches want.” “I don’t know my profit margin.” “I don’t know how I’m going to retire.” ….in fact, many gym owners bail out of the Checkup partway through, use the “phone a friend” button, and book the call anyway, because it’s obvious their business is out of control. You manage what you measure. You control what you know. As a coach, you’d never let an athlete post an estimated score. “I think I did Fran in under 3:00.” You’d never guess at their body fat percentage. “I think you’re around 30%, and I think you used to be around 33%. Great work.” You’d never accept a guess. “I bet I could lift 500lbs.” You would test, and retest. You would KNOW. When you open a business, coaching isn’t your job anymore; it’s your service. Your business provides a platform for that service. Your job is to build that platform. That means it’s your job to know your ARM, your LEG, your profit margin. It’s your job to know what your coaches want: is to more work, or less? Has that answer changed in the last two months? We can blame poor software options for our lack of knowledge, ...
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Control the outcome

January 31, 2018 Personal Development
By Jay Williams, TwoBrain mentor “I think i’m gonna cancel my membership” – a random member   “Some of the morning crew are asking why we are doing so many power cleans” – your morning coach   “How can you charge that much, you’re crazy!” – A random email from a prospect   “I don’t know how to do it” – Your evening coach, when you asked them to do some simple task you thought you explained to them.   You ever have one of those days?   Nothing by itself is too serious, but all together it just beats you down.   At the end of a day like this, you want to throw your hands in the air and say “f— it, I’m done”   Been there…last Thursday, in fact.   What do you do when you have a day like this?   How do you handle stress?   For me, it used to be a beer or two.   Then, it became a workout, or meditation.   All these things work to make you feel better, but they don’t fix the problem.   When you’re dealing with all these little things, you have no control over the circumstances.   Lack of control causes stress.   So how can you get your control back?   Two simple steps: control your day, and control the flow of information.   To break it down: 1) Control your day (especially the start) Go back up to that list and imagine that all that bad stuff happened on the same day you signed up 10 new clients. Do they cause you the same amount of stress? Or do you have a different perspective? They are still annoying, but maybe it’s not so bad if OTHER things are going well. What if you focused the first half of your day on making things like this happen? There are a dozen things you could ...
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How To Trap A Mule

January 30, 2018 Personal Development
“This is all I know. This is all I have. And I’ll die in this gym if I have to.”   I had that mantra stuck to my desk for a couple of years. It’s a song lyric–I can’t remember the band, but Jim Wendler quoted them in one of his blog posts. And it’s all you need to know about my mindset as a young entrepreneur.   “I will lead this horse to water and hold its head under until it drinks.” I actually wrote that on a blog post in 2010. I still believed in martyrdom then. I still believed that the hustle was the answer. Gary Vaynerchuk wasn’t a household name then; no gym owners were talking about “the grind”. But every morning at 5am, before the lights at the gym even warmed up, I’d press my cheek against the front window and look down the street to make sure my gym was open first.   I wanted to believe that the hardest worker would win. I told myself that lie because I know I can outwork anyone. If putting your head down and trudging forward, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse–if that made a business successful, I was a born winner.   If volume of work was the answer, I had a huge advantage: I’d been trained for work since birth. Trudging through snow to a frozen stream in the dark; chopping a hole through the ice with an ax; hauling pails uphill to meet thirsty animals that wanted to butt me aside? Yeah, I did that. At age eight. I’ve been on sinking boats. I’ve followed the blood trail of a wounded bear without a rifle. I’ve passed out in hayfields from heatstroke, and then finished the day. I worked on a logging crew in college. I have frostbite in both ears and most of my toes to remind me of ...
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