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A second location doesn’t double your work; it quadruples it.   Is it worth opening a second gym? What about buying another local gym in town? The answer is “sometimes, yes!”   Sometimes a second location IS a great opportunity. Sometimes it’s a polished-up turd. And sometimes we’re just not ready for the opportunity when it does arise. In these cases, we don’t rise to the occasion; we fall to the level of our preparation.   Before you buy someone else’s mistakes–or duplicate your own–here’s the checklist we use with TwoBrain clients to determine whether they’re ready to open a second location:   Is your first location generating at least 33% gross profit margin, including your pay? Could your business run without you–without ANY contact from you–for at least two weeks? Are you already maximizing your revenue in your current space (3 core revenue streams, including group, PT and nutrition)? How will the second location impact your Perfect Day? Do you need this second location to get those clients? If another gym is closing, will you probably get them ANYWAY? And if you’re opening a second location from scratch, will your current clients split? Will this opportunity be available a year from now? In other words, do you have to do it right NOW?   If the answer to the first question is “no”, then you’re still in Farmer Phase. You can be ready for another location within a few months, but jumping in NOW will hurt your core business and probably your personal relationships. The Incubator will get you ready.   If the answer to the second question is “no”, see above. The Incubator solves that problem, too.   If the answer to the third question is “no”, ditto. Incubator.   The fourth question is trickier. Sometimes we want to seize every opportunity. Sometimes we want to stop others from having opportunities. And sometimes we confuse two gyms with ...

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 ...

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 ...