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The Currency of Coffee

November 5, 2015 Selling Gym Memberships
What’s your coffee worth? Depending on the time of day, that value could range from .30 to 5.00. As I wrote in “The Boldness Bump,” the price anchor for coffee has changed. But this essay is about the value of coffee to OTHERS. Coffee opens doors. Coffee stirs conversation. Here’s how I’ve used it to great advantage: In Catalyst’s annual “Fit It Forward” week, the first assignment I give our clients is literally “Buy a stranger a coffee.” Every year, in drive-thrus and coffee lines, dozens of Catalyst clients say, “I’ll pay for the guy behind me.” The benefit is far greater than the price of a cup, and the purchaser feels good all day. But until I told them to do it, few were. In our second location (2006,) our gym was above a women’s clothing shop. On opening day, I took the sales staff a tray of coffee as an introduction. That same afternoon, a teenager dropped a power snatch from over his head; all the track lighting in the shop below broke free and shattered. We resolved it peacefully. That coffee saved me five years of war with the neighbors. Before Catalyst opened, I sought advice from an elderly attorney. My partners-to-be were friendly guys with successful businesses, but I thought it wise to be careful. I walked down the street to the attorney’s office and stopped to buy him a coffee on the way. I could barely afford the coffee, let alone his advice, but he said, “Thanks for the coffee. I needed that. No bill.” In January 2013, I sat in the original Starbucks in Seattle with some of the HQ “inner circle”–Andy Stumpf, Sevan Metossian, and Jimi Letchford–and we were waiting for Greg. I was dangerously close to missing a flight home. But the wait gave me the opportunity to lay out what I was doing with 321GoProject over coffee. The next time I visited HQ, ...
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The Conjugate System for the Competitive CrossFit Athlete

November 5, 2015 Personal Development
by Jason Brown At more and more CrossFit boxes there are regular people moving extraordinary weights on a weekly basis. At CrossFit 781 we certainly do not neglect our strength training and have solidified ourselves as one of the strongest boxes around. Some people may think we have a strength bias or that our conjugate training leans more towards people increasing their training maxes rather than their conditioning. I definitely think there is some truth to this, but I’m going to tell you why we are able to cover all our bases on a weekly basis as well as outline a basic week of training and the structure we use to achieve multi-dimensional training perspectives in balanced and efficient way. The conjugate system by definition is a system that has features that are inverse in nature. To further demonstrate the basis of the conjugate system, there are multiple perspectives to this system that make it so successful. One being Max Effort Work. Max effort work occurs twice per week for both lower and upper body. Here the loads are high and the training volume is low. The variations rotate weekly preventing accommodation, burnout, as well as consistent improvement of training maxes. Louie Simmons developed the conjugate system from the Bulgarian system where lifters would hit a max for the day regularly. The conjugate system utilizes a long list of variations where maxes for the day are hit. More times than not people are hitting new records for a particular movement. The benefit of moving large loads is intra/intermuscular coordination but also psychological in the sense that you become accustomed to continuously hitting personal records albeit they may not be with the classic lifts. Typically we only test the classic lifts every 12 weeks where new maxes are almost always achieved. The inverse to max effort training is dynamic or speed training which occurs 72 hours after its counterpart max effort ...
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Two-Brain Radio Episode 3: Deacon Andrews

November 2, 2015 Gym Operations Podcast
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Beating The "Quit" Fantasy

October 30, 2015 Member Retention
It usually happens on a Friday. Driving to the gym in the dark, first coffee steaming in the cupholder, you look at the clock and think, “In less than an hour, I have to be in front of people.” You haven’t showered yet. Your mind races through your morning checklist, and you know you won’t have time to do it all before the first client arrives. On less than six hours’ sleep, you’re tired. These days, you’re drinking too much coffee. Your training loads and intensity are going down. You react negatively to clients’ mistakes, and you KNOW it; you see yourself on a downward spiral. And you think, “What if I just quit?” Others do. Gyms close. Owners “retire” to other jobs. Some give up on gym growth and start side businesses: t-shirt companies, website design, or even consulting. But they don’t have to. It’s tempting to think, “I could just walk away. Get a real job. Be home on weekends.” Here’s how to break out of that rut: First, recognize the behavior as an emotional response to a logical problem. Some gyms are faring poorly, but others are faring VERY well. It’s possible. Second, don’t wait until you’ve hit rock bottom to make changes. If you’re breaking even, you might think profitability is right around the corner. But the systems that got you HERE won’t get you THERE. You’re a coach; you know this to be true everywhere else. You’ll probably have to take a step backward to move three steps forward. I hear from many gyms with 100 clients that aren’t profitable. On the other hand, one of my mentoring clients did $26,000 gross on 70 clients last month. Third, the answer to anxiety is service to others. Who can you help? Sherman Merricks (Dynasty CrossFit) invites all other local box owners to his gym once every month to share what he’s learned in the 321GoAcademy. Last week, ...
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How To Start A Remote Coaching Business

October 30, 2015 Gym Operations
As I wrote in Two-Brain Business 2.0, an online coaching business is a scalable asset with little investment. There’s a great big world out there, and the coaches who enter the market first will benefit most. In the past, virtual coaching was limited by feedback: the coach couldn’t see the athlete, and had to live primarily by notes or the athlete’s memory later. I remember collaborating with another coach in 2005: he wrote her endurance program, and I wrote her strengthening program. Every week, he’d get on a call with her to ask how the training was going. It invariably led to an hour-long talk about her feelings with very little objective feedback. By contrast, I could see her perform in the gym and say, “You did that six seconds faster than last week.” Now that’s all changed. Self-photo and self-video is commonplace. Storage is cheap. Kevin Kelley believes that, in five years, virtual reality will be as commonplace as cell phones are now. And with a tiered approach, a good coach can earn more income in less time online than in person. What do you need for online coaching? A tiered pricing system. This will allow for a high-volume low price option, a custom option, and a custom-plus option. A great (but simple) website extolling the benefits (not features) of your programming A delivery mechanism as simple as Google Sheets or a more complex system An audience. As I wrote in “Help First,” you’ll have to establish your expertise before anyone will value your service. A system for receiving payment, tracking tiered memberships, collecting interest and sending email, storing video uploads and offering services. Here are the WordPress Plugins I use on TwoBrainCoaching.com: Subscriptio – allows you to sell different service levels, and automagically controls access for subscribers. Memberships for WooCommerce – allows for autodialing every month, and links with Subscriptio Out-of-the-Box – allows users to upload videos to your ...
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Two-Brain Radio Episode 2: Jason Ackerman

October 26, 2015 Gym Operations Podcast
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