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Playing The Long Game: Embrace Your Inner Tortoise

September 21, 2017 Personal Development
Slow and steady wins the race. The lesson of the timeless fable—the Tortoise and the Hare—are well-known. We might even agree that it’s best approach to many things in life, but how often do we heed that advice? Consider a classic CrossFit workout template: the 20-minute AMRAP. When the clock counts down—three, two, one, go!—at what percentage of your maximal effort do you go out of the gates? One hundred percent? Do you think you could keep that up for 20 minutes? We know through experience that we can’t. Therefore, to give ourselves the greatest chance at success, we should pace ourselves. If we maintain 80 percent for 20 minutes, we will beat anyone who goes 100 percent out of the gate and quickly hits the wall, dropping to 50 percent effort and worse as the clock ticks away. More importantly, we’ll recover more quickly and be ready to put in a good workout the next day. I apply the same philosophy to reading or listening to audiobooks, which is part of my self-development practice. If I read or listen to a book for one hour per day, after ten years I will have listened to 3,650 hours and taken in a tremendous amount of information and perspective. However, if I try to consume three hours of books every day but only do that consistently for two years—because it got overwhelming and I gave up—I will have taken in only 730 hours of content. How many times have you hyped yourself up for a new routine or goal only to have it slip away to the chaos of life and business? You might be tempted to berate yourself for your lack of motivation. But in reality, you don’t need more motivation; you need consistency. Whether your goal is to work out more, cook healthier meals or start a business, visualize the end result and create a plan of attack you ...
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The Two Pictures I Hang, And What They Represent

September 20, 2017 Gym Marketing
I have two pictures hanging in my office.   The first is a painting of trilliums. It was done by a famous local artist, Doug Hook. I grew up with Doug’s son. Doug’s pretty old now, but he’s still alive, and his art is expensive. Hanging a Hook print in your office means that you can afford the best.   The other picture is a photograph: a hockey team of 11-year-old girls with my daughter Avery in the center. Their jerseys say “Catalyst” on them. They’re all sweaty and smiling, fingers set in the “we’re number one” sign, celebrating some win. You can see in their eyes that they think, “This is it, we’ve made it to the peak of life.” And they might be right.   A Doug Hook painting on your wall means you’ve made a lot of money.   A pic of your kid’s team–that you can afford to sponsor–means you’ve made it.   One of my first conversations with Sherman Merricks (owner of Dynasty CrossFit and Two-Brain mentor-in-training) is one of my all-time favorites.   I asked about Sherman’s financial goals. He said,   “I want my wife to walk into a store and buy any dress she wants without looking at the price tag.”   The reason Sherman and I want to be successful is because our income goals were set to support our lifestyle goals.   Every December, entrepreneurs in the TwoBrain family set five goals in five categories:   Lifestyle Education Travel Service …and Income.   Income is last, because it depends on the others:   Where do you want to travel next year? What will that cost? What will you learn? What will the education cost? Who will you serve? What will that cost?   My service goal includes helping youth through sport. Volunteering to coach a local hockey team creates a perfect backdrop for life mentoring. It gives me an excuse to ...
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Why Millionaires Have Mentors

September 19, 2017 Vision
The last five gym owners to sign up for the Incubator all have multiple gyms and a solid lifestyle. In fact, almost every single one said “Chris, I’m pretty close to living my perfect day already.”   Each of these–four men, and one woman–realized the danger of getting complacent. I know it all too well.   In November 2016, after a long day of working on interesting problems, I had a quiet moment in my basement office. Before heading upstairs to join my family for dinner, I asked myself “Why am I pushing so hard?”   I was earning more money than I needed. I was achieving my educational goals, my travel goals, my lifestyle goals AND my service-beyond-self goals. I didn’t need more.   And my next literal thought was, “I need to find a new mentor.”   If you’ve read any of my four books, you know that mentorship turned my first business around. My first mentor focused my attention, removed distractions, and gave me the traction to turn my gym into a very profitable (and happy) business.   Now, I realized, I needed someone else to do the same thing. Because I’m never happy while at rest.   I called Dan Martell, who I had just seen onstage with Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin, and asked if he’d help me. He agreed. And his guidance helped TwoBrain become the largest mentoring practice in the fitness industry.   Every single one of these five new members of the TwoBrain Family have something ELSE in common: opportunity.   Each owns multiple gyms. Every one has large, beyond-the-box ideas. They have investors knocking on their door. Or maybe they have a kids’ team to sponsor. But they all faced more than the inertia of settling for what they already have: they all faced the paralysis of choice.   Having too MANY opportunities can be as challenging as having too FEW ...
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Episode 88: Buy This, Be Happy

September 18, 2017 Personal Development Podcast
 
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A rubber hex dumbbell sits on the rubber floor of a microgym with golden sunlight streaming in through windows to the left.

How to Say "No" to Discounts

September 15, 2017 Selling Gym Memberships
By now, you already know this: Discounts kill businesses. I made the case in “Why We Don’t Have Sales.” But there are two parts to change: The first is making the decision to change, and the second is actually making the change. In other words, knowing what to do is half the battle (or less). Taking action is really all that matters. To help you act, I’ll supply the easiest ways to say “no” when someone asks for a discount. 1. “We don’t have discounts.” This is my go-to. Because I don’t have discounts for anyone, it’s simplest for me to say that discounts don’t exist. This has solved our “discount” problem for over six years. 2. When someone else is giving discounts “We don’t play those games.” Because the nature of discounts is subjective (it requires a human “decision” instead of an automated process), it’s always easy to cast a shadow of doubt on the intent on the discounter. I saw this in action when I was selling high-end fitness equipment. We were always in a losing price battle against Sears and other department stores that ran frequent “sales” on treadmills. So when someone asked us to match a price or when we’d have a 40 percent off sale, we’d say, “We don’t play those games.” It worked: You could see a visible shift in the purchaser as he or she became suspicious of the chains offering the discount. It helped that one of the department stores was sued for advertising a regular price on tires that it never actually charged—they were always on sale. I occasionally brought that up. 3. When someone asks for a specific discount Members of some service groups receive discounts from other businesses, so they’re inclined to ask for them everywhere. Here’s your response: “We treat all our service professionals equally well because we know our service is critical for your safety.” The service ...
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Why We Buy The iPhone X, But Complain About The Price of CrossFit

September 14, 2017 Gym Marketing
Zig Ziglar was a traveling salesman in the 1940s. He did door-to-door sales for decades, eventually becoming a popular sales coach and public speaker. He recounted this tale in his book, “Ziglar on Selling”.   Ziglar was in a family’s living room–the studio for his art–pitching cookware. The family desperately needed cookware; there were many of them, and mama spent much of the day over a hot stove, reusing the same pot. Ziglar spent two hours trying to convince them that new cookware would save mama a lot of time cooking and even more time cleaning. But the family–mama included–kept repeating, “no money, too expensive, can’t afford it.”   As he was packing his samples into his suitcase, mama spied a catalogue for fine china in Ziglar’s bag. She asked if he sold fine china, and he said, “Yes ma’am, we sell the finest china in the world!”   She and the family made a huge order for fine china–one of Ziglar’s biggest sales–in the middle of a depression. I’ll let Zig take it from here:   “Less than thirty minutes later, I left that household with an order worth substantially more than the entire set of cookware. Now think with me. If she couldn’t afford the set of cookware she so desperately needed, how could she afford the china she didn’t need? The answer is, she couldn’t afford a set of cookware she didn’t want, but she could afford a set of fine china she did want. Here is the key point: People buy what they want when they want it more than the money it costs.”   We are not rational beings, but emotional ones.   We don’t weigh purchase decisions logically (“I can cut my $4 daily coffee budget and be able to afford $120 per month at the gym.”) Instead, we approach every purchase decision from an emotional perspective first. Then we rationalize that decision.   ...
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