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Be Relentless With Your Vision

April 23, 2017 Vision
by Jeff Burlingame In January, I was at the end of my rope with one of my coaches. She was calling off classes with short notice; paying attention to only one or two athletes in a class (later determined to be “her crew”); had bombed a nutrition challenge and the New You Program; and overall was dropping the ball. Six months earlier, she was gung-ho and asking for more responsibility. I was excited for her. Around this time, she also started to get serious about competing at the Regional level in CrossFit. She was even recruited by a top-level coach. I was pumped for her… until she started to fail at her responsibilities at the gym. Training for competition is very demanding. But my responsibility to my clients and family meant that I had to get her on track with her gym responsibilities. Finally I met with her and we discussed her Perfect Day. She said she wanted to focus on being an athlete, so we agreed that the best plan of action was to pull her off 70% of her classes,  cut back on her nutrition coaching and focus on training. She agreed, and that was the end of it. Or so I thought. A week later I found out that she was working at another box down the street, a blatant infraction on her non-compete agreement. This time I knew that I had dropped the ball. Finally I had to make a REAL decision. So I referred to my VISION and CORE VALUES. I asked myself “Am I adding value for my members by keeping this coach?” The answer, of course, was NO. Plain and simple, no gray area, just NO. The next day I called her in, fired her on the spot, and the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders. The following week I caught wind that “her crew”, the 7:30 AM class (2 people), were saying some “things” about me. They ...
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Why Are They Here?

April 21, 2017 Gym Operations
By Ken Andrukow, TwoBrain Mentor Previously, I talked about the importance of “Knowing Your Client’s Why” from the big-picture perspective of services you can offer to address their needs and keep them engaged in your gym for a lifetime. Today we’ll look at your client’s “why” from a core business step you may be missing: your new client intake. How do you bring in or process new clients into your community and get them started with the services you offer? Do you have them fill out a standard form, tell them about your Foundations class, sign them up for their five introductory sessions and then push them into regular WOD programming? Probably. But how does this address your client’s “why”? It’s time to ditch the one-size-fits-all approach and give your new clients what they need. Here are two typical examples of new prospects you want to see walking into your gym. The first is a 42-year-old woman with two kids and is 45 pounds overweight, who tells you she hasn’t been in a gym since her teens. Your first step should be to ask why she walked into your gym. Maybe she’s looking to have more energy to do activities with her kids and wants to look better in her clothes, rather than deadlift 275 pounds and do a rope climb. Next, find out what she does well already. Perhaps she brought a dog into the family three months ago the kids aren’t looking after, so she takes it for a 45-minute walk every day. These walks will serve as both building blocks for her confidence as well as the program you’re going to design for her. The wrong solution would be to put her in your Foundations program for five classes and move her into regular WODs. She’ll hang in for two months only to quit because it’s overwhelming and not geared to her needs right now. First, you ...
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Do you manage your day, or does your day manage you?

April 20, 2017 Personal Development
Do you manage your day, or does your day manage you? If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you go through your day like a cowboy: guns blazing, reacting to everything that happens in your business.  You get busy being busy. When you have some time to actually sit down and get some work done, you are either too tired or forgot what you need to work on. Your brain isn’t sharp. That’s when procrastination sets in. The deadly, “I’ll get to it tomorrow” conversation begins in your head. You go to sleep with the best intentions and then wake up and it happens again:  the day happens to you.  The day manages you. Sound familiar? At TwoBrain Business we teach the 10 hour CEO method: setting aside a certain number of hours each week to move your business forward. Gym owners start with one dedicated hour on their business, then a second–working up to a minimum of 10 per week. In this article, I’ll teach you how to divide your day into blocks, and have specific times to focus on the things that matter most.  Below is an example of how I block my day and how it works when I am wearing different hats at different times. I block off family time, CEO time, time to workout, time for TBB mentoring calls etc.. Step 1:  Create Blocks for your day Using a typical week from my calendar as an example, I clearly outline what I am to be doing and when I am to be doing it.  Time to train/workout, family time, CEO time, self development, mentoring calls, and goal setting/intros are all clearly laid out.   All of my calendars and scheduling apps align and my entire team has access to this calendar to see what I am doing and when I am doing  it. After you have created blocks for your day we can begin to develop a workflow. If you are anything like me, you ...
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Episode 68: Dan Martell

April 17, 2017 Podcast Vision
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Episode 53: Selling Personal Training

April 10, 2017 Podcast Selling Gym Memberships
 
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Abundance

April 6, 2017 Personal Development
The greatest lesson I ever learned from Dave Tate had nothing to do with a barbell. In November 2015, I mustered every powerlifting connection I could find to get me an interview with Dave. I set up my recording equipment, made a long list of questions, and paced for a half hour before starting the call. The podcast interview was recorded and published here. But then I made the podcaster’s biggest error: I stopped recording before we hung up. After saying my thanks, the conversation continued. Dave asked ME a few questions, and we chatted a bit about TwoBrain. I asked him a question about how he protected his intellectual property: Dave publishes a LOT of content online, and I’ve seen verbatim copies of his blog posts everywhere. In 2015, that was already happening to me. So I asked, “How do you stop the copycats?” He said, “I don’t.” And that’s when I should have hit “record” again. But I was too enthralled by what he said next. “The best people will find you, Chris. They’re going to try other mentoring programs first, and that’s okay. The top ten percent will jump from coach to coach until they find you, and then they’ll stick.” This way of thinking is called the Abundance Mentality, and it’s common among all the mentors I’ve had in my life. Here are the main points: 1. You don’t need everyone. 2. Excellence is your baseline, but it’s not enough. 3. People are smart. 4. The best will find you. This has been a hard lesson. Every few weeks, I get a friendly message from a friend: “This guy is copying you. See this screen shot.” Or this: To those who care enough to mention it, thank you for your diligence. You already know this lesson, though I struggle to learn it daily–and have been for years. When I opened my first CrossFit gym, it was ...
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