When Braeden Cordts bought his gym, he had $300,000 in student debt, 28 paying members and a business that was losing money every month.
His family told him it wouldn’t work. His friends told him it wouldn’t work. Pretty much everyone told him it wouldn’t work.
Five years later, he’s a certified Millionaire Gym Owner running a gym that does $55,000 a month—and he just knocked down two walls to make room for more growth.
This is his story.
A Long Road to the Gym Floor
Braeden didn’t walk a straight line to gym ownership. He started at North Dakota State University studying mechanical engineering and spent three years drinking and doing drugs, numbing out feelings he didn’t know how to name.
CrossFit pulled him out of it.
“CrossFit saved my life,” he said. “That was step number one.”
Step number two was a book his mom gave him: “Chase the Lion” by Mark Batterson. The premise: If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.
He got his Level 1 because he couldn’t afford a gym membership. He coached for free just to train. And somewhere in there, he fell completely in love with helping people.
He eventually ended up in Minnesota, coaching at two gyms while grinding through chiropractic school. At this point, he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and supported by his wife.
Then COVID hit, and the owner of one of those gyms, Made to Live, burned out.
28 Members and a Losing Business
When Braeden took over and rebranded to Kôr Fitness & Performance, there were technically 50-something members on the books. But only 28 were actually paying, and not all of them were paying full price. The rest were coaches or friends on discounted or free memberships.
The gym was losing money. Braeden’s dad was the only one willing to back him.
“I still don’t know why he trusted me,” Braeden said. “But he was like, ‘I trust you. You have a burning passion to help others and make an impact.’”
It took three months just to get the gym out of the red.
Free Tools First
Braeden couldn’t afford a mentor right away. So he did what a lot of gym owners do at the start—he consumed everything Two-Brain put out for free. Books, articles, YouTube videos. He’d listen to old Two-Brain podcast episodes on his drive to chiropractic school.
“There’s so much free material,” he said. “But it’s almost like there’s no clarity of what your best next step is.”
That clarity came when he finally got into mentorship—about a year to a year and a half into gym ownership.
His first mentor was Brian Strump, also a chiropractor and gym owner. Braeden described him as “the post-it note man,” always zeroing in on the one thing that needed to happen next.
“That clarity, that third party saying, ‘This is what you need to be doing right now’—that’s what changed everything.”
In his first year of mentorship, Braeden’s gym grew by roughly 80%.
The Boring Stuff Is Actually the Shiny Stuff
Here’s what Braeden credits most for that growth: systems.
Not viral content. Not a clever six-week challenge. Systems.
After getting the foundation in place, he started pouring into his members through Goal Review Sessions and No Sweat Intros.
He promoted a coach who’d come from a gym down the road and wanted to build a real career in fitness. She assumed the Client Success Manager role and has since quit her teaching job to go full-time as Operations Manager.
“A burnt out gym owner is not a good gym owner,” he said. “You can’t feed into your people. You can’t feed into your staff.”
The systems gave him the bandwidth to actually show up for his community. And the results compounded. The gym went from under $5,000 a month in revenue to consistently hitting $55,000 or better, growing more than 40% with every year of mentorship.
Adding Personal Training Changed the Numbers
For a long time, group fitness was the whole business at Kôr Fitness & Performance. Braeden knew that wasn’t sustainable as a growth path.
About a year ago, personal training and semi-private training became serious revenue streams. He handed his own PT clients off to Megan, his second full-time coach, who has built it into a significant chunk of the business. Today, about 30% of the gym’s revenue comes from personal training.
The financial impact was direct: The gym went from hovering around $30,000-$40,000 months to consistently landing at $55,000. That’s more than a quarter million dollars in additional annual revenue bolted onto a business that was already growing.
Wealth Beyond the Gym
Becoming a Millionaire Gym Owner wasn’t just about what was happening inside the four walls of Core Fitness.
Braeden and his wife had stumbled into house hacking before they even knew what to call it: buying homes, moving and renting out the previous one. They now have two rental properties and own three acres of land where they plan to build their family home.
When Braeden joined Two-Brain’s Tinker program (focused on helping gym owners build real wealth), it brought clarity to everything he’d been doing intuitively.
“Tinker gave me clarity on where to go with my wealth and how to build it even more,” he said. “I literally had everything in the gym and two rental properties. Now I’m doing syndications. I bought into another gym. I’m diversifying.”
What He Tells Struggling Gym Owners
Braeden is now a Two-Brain mentor himself, working with gym owners who are at the beginning of the same road he’s been on.
The biggest thing he sees them struggling with: clarity. Too many ideas, too many directions, no focus on the one thing that will actually move the needle.
His system: Write down ten ideas, circle the three that seem best, then pick the one that addresses what’s hurting most in the business right now. Do that one thing completely before moving on to the next.
“Don’t go on to the next article, the next video, the next book until that one thing is done,” he said. “Otherwise you’re just consuming to consume. You’re going to spin in circles.”
And for the gym owners who are deep in the struggle right now (the ones who might sell their gym for a Chipotle burrito on a bad day), his message is simple:
“I feel it. I hear you. It’s part of the journey. Reach out, get help, find a mentor, focus on one thing and move on. You’ll get through it, and you’ll be better for it.”
Braeden went from a self-described train wreck to a millionaire gym owner in five years. He did it by doing boring things really well, building systems before he needed them, and asking for help when he couldn’t see the label from inside the jar.
If you want help figuring out your next step, we’re here. Book a call with the Two-Brain team today.
