Book a call

Blog

Transform your gym
in 5 minutes a day.

Get the no-BS morning newsletter read by 30,000 gym owners.

Lead.

May 1, 2017 Gym Operations
“For this reason, they must believe in the cause for which they are fighting. They must believe in the plan they are asked to execute, and most important, they must believe in and trust the leader they are asked to follow.” ― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win In the effort to be a better mentor, I study leadership a lot. I learn from my own mentors; read the biographies of leaders; listen to their words while training or driving my truck. Here are the things common to successful leaders: 1. They model the behavior they want from others. 2. They give clear directions, with no missing steps 3. They fall back on daily routines 4. They make a lot of mistakes, but never the same one twice. 5. They’re not confident all the time, but know it’s more important to appear confident than ambivalent. 6. They create other leaders. To break these down for business owners: 1. Modelling In college, I had a nutrition professor who was a walking textbook. She could recite data and draw tables about glycemic load and macronutrient profiles. But she also ate McDonald’s in her office after class. I can’t recall a single lecture she gave, but I can recall the smell of her desk area perfectly. This is sometimes an inconvenient truth, but “do as I say, not as I do” is ineffective. If you’re a parent, you already know it won’t work. But it’s easy to fool yourself into believing your clients don’t care about what YOU do. If you’re a hairdresser, your hair should look great every day. If you’re a personal trainer, you should work out. If you’re selling stocks and bonds, you should wear something expensive. Your staff will follow the example you set at your worst. Your adherence to your own rules will cue them to follow. If you break your own rules occasionally, they’ll break them ...
Read More →

The Power of Bandwidth, Focus and Momentum

April 27, 2017 Gym Marketing
The Power of Bandwidth, Focus and Momentum If you’ve spent any time on Facebook over the past six months, you’ve seen the video entitled “A Valuable Lesson For A Happier Life” In it, a professor shows his students that when you fill your jar of life first with the most important elements of life (family, friends, health, and passions), there is room for the more mundane tasks and priorities around them. However, if you fill up a jar with small, menial tasks, your jar is too full to fit in the large commitments that provide you with the most happiness. Make sure you take a little time out to watch the video again because I believe the analogy applies just as much to happiness as it does to your flow state as a gym owner. I want you to imagine that the jar represents the bandwidth of energy you have to devote to your business activities. It’s a finite space, and if you fill it with the wrong things first, you have no room for the tasks that provide you with the biggest return on investment. Imagine the sand in the jar are all the little tasks that you can spend time on in the gym like taking out the trash, repairing equipment or even coaching classes. These are necessary tasks that make a gym run, but should you fill up your jar with them? Coaching is a great example of a sandy activity. You feel that by coaching classes you’re keeping in touch with your clients and keeping your skills sharp. But much like sand, coaching spreads everywhere and gets into your shoes, your ears and your swimsuit (and that stuff chafes!). A one-hour class means one hour beforehand prepping and greeting athletes, one hour leading the workout, 10 minutes after to cheer on the last finishers, and another 30 minutes saying goodbye as people walk out the door. ...
Read More →

2017 TwoBrain Clients' Choice Award

April 24, 2017 Personal Development
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”13423″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Gyms owners enrolled in the TwoBrain Business mentorship program are dedicated to excellence. They spend months working on systems to make your experience better; perfecting ‘best practices’; and collaborating on ideas that will improve your experience. We celebrate their attention to detail (the “left brain”) and care (the “right brain”) in their fitness practice with our annual TwoBrain Awards Ceremony. Each year at our annual Summit, we present awards to top-performing gym owners in our 7 Areas of Excellence. Many of these can be measured objectively through data collection and tracking. But one especially–Gym Culture–is beyond the limits of a spreadsheet. So we turn to you: the client. YOU are the reason the gym owner wakes up at 4am. YOU are their pride, their passion and their purpose. Their gym exists to serve YOU. How’s YOUR gym doing? Is it the best gym in the universe? Let us know! Nominate the owner of YOUR gym for the prestigious 2017 TwoBrain Clients’ Choice Award:       [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Read More →

Episode 69: Conversions Expert Raphael Paulin-Daigle of SplitBase

April 24, 2017 Member Retention Podcast
 
Read More →

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 ...
Read More →

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 ...
Read More →

Categories

Main Menu