Episode 179: Q & A With Coop
Chris: 00:00 – Hey everybody, it’s Chris. Since 2009 I have tried to give you guys daily content that helps you grow your gym and that was the start of dontbuyads.com, that was the thousand blog posts or so I did that led up to my different books and now we do that with free help calls online. But sometimes we get really amazing questions that get repeated over and over again. And so every few months where I like to do is take these questions, highlight the best ones, and answer them on this podcast. So in this episode you’re going to hear some of the best questions that we get sent through email every single day. If you have a question and you haven’t booked a free call with our mentors, that’s the best way to get your question answered. If you have a question that you think is abnormal, the best way to ask it is to email me chris@twobrainbusiness.com. Sometimes people shoot me these long, long messages that are hard to read on Facebook Messenger. And then honestly I get lost on Facebook Messenger, sometimes, so I don’t get them. But every single email that hits my inbox gets answered. So if you have questions you think that are new that other people could benefit from hearing the answer of, I promise to keep you anonymous and we will play them on a future episode. Enjoy.
Greg: 01:15 – Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com. We’d like to think another one of our amazing partners, Level Method. As a CrossFit gym owner, I know retention is key to keeping my business going for years to come. Retention is not easy though. People want to see success and if you don’t show them early, they’ll find a place that does. This is where Level Method comes in. With Level Method, you are now able to guide your members through an amazing structure that’ll give them a path to success. Once you have success, you instantly have motivation for them to continue, which will now be delivered to your members. Start systemizing the creation of powerful moments for your members today. Go to levelmethod.com to book a free call.
Eden: 02:10 – Hello everyone, it’s Eden Watson here coming to you from the Two-Brain workshop, and I am lucky enough today to interview Chris Cooper, the one and only. Chris, welcome to your own podcast.
Chris: 02:26 – Thanks a lot, Eden.
Eden: 02:26 – As you folks know, Chris writes to us almost every day. Well, he does write for us every day, and he tries to answer some of the reoccurring questions that he receives in some of your emails and he answers those love letters. But on occasion he sends us directly some of the themes that come up. So as you may or may not know, Chris has recently published a book called “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” and it’s got a definition for the four stages of entrepreneurship. Chris, will you share a little bit what it means to be in each of the stages?
Chris: 02:59 – Yeah, sure. So the four phases of entrepreneurship are Founder, Farmer, Tinker, and Thief, and in the Founder Phase you’ve just launched your business and you’re trying to survive, basically. You’re trying to get cashflow positive. You don’t have any clients yet. Maybe you’ve got a space, but you really make . In the Farmer Phase, your business has been been open, you’ve hit the break-even point at least once and now you realize that you have to turn this from a job that you bought for yourself to an actual business. And so the big steps involved in the Farmer Phase are really like hiring staff, replacing yourself in lower-value roles, maybe even replacing yourself in the primary delivery role and ascending to this level of like manager. Then the Tinker Phase is when your business is solid and you’re using that first business as a foundation for your wealth platform. So now you’re diversifying, maybe. Might be opening a second business. You might be duplicating the first, you might be doing something completely different like buying a building. But what you’re trying to do is set yourself up for a reliable platform of wealth. And then in the Thief Phase, you have that platform of wealth and what you’re trying to build in Thief is your legacy. So you’re trying to leverage all of your success to create a legacy for your family, but also for your community.
Eden: 04:44 – OK. So given those four stages of entrepreneurship that you’ve explained, I would suggest and others have suggested that you’d probably be in Thief Phase. What phase do you actually feel you’re in now?
Chris: 04:56 – I’d say that I’m in Tinker Phase with Two-Brain and you know, so listeners know, like I still own several companies. Two-Brain is the largest and it’s the one I’m most passionate about, so it commands the vast majority of my attention. But I’m in Tinker Phase with that. And so what that means is I need to build a platform and solidify Two-Brain by hiring people who are more specialized and more expert than I am at certain areas and replace myself there. Means that I’m introducing a management layer into my life for the first time, like C-level executives. You know, CSO, CFO, COO. It means that a lot of these people are more talented at their particular skillset than I am. And it also means that I have to be willing to allow big ideas to like crop up and replace my original ideas. So Tinker Phase is where a lot of successful entrepreneurs actually tank and some of them wisely sell their companies to people who are more experienced CEOs instead of trying to grow into a CEO or leadership role themselves. In many cases that’s really, really wise. Some of us who started the business out of passion don’t want to give up that seat. And so we have to go through this hard journey of like leadership development and being comfortable with, you know, spending a lot of money, being comfortable with trusting people to do things better than you originally would have. And there’s also like imposter syndrome that goes on with a lot of people. I’m lucky that I’ve never really suffered from that. And then you know, you have to invest in other things too, like data collection. You know, I never thought that I would spend $1 million a year collecting numbers on a spreadsheet, but we do. So yeah, I’m in Tinker Phase right now and I am taking some steps toward Thief Phase, one of the benefits of the book that most people report is like, OK, I know what I have to prioritize next. And the biggest struggle in Tinker Phase is really focus. There’s so many opportunities, so many people want partner with Two-Brain that it can be hard to focus and just do the work that will help gym owners. And so that’s where I struggle on a daily basis. And I think we’re going to come to that question later, but knowing like what the next phase is for me, which is making sure that this legacy of entrepreneurship and helping my community can continue is really what guides me in the day to day.
Eden: 07:20 – So in Tinker Phase you’re having some resources to chase down all these ideas and work on all these ideas to avoid getting lost .
Chris: 07:36 – Yeah, I mean I get three or four great ideas a week and they’re almost always good. And we’re very tempted to do them. And I’ll give you an example. Like a year and a half ago we said we need a better way to track gym owner success. Nobody else is gonna do it. Nobody else has the resources or the reach to do it. Therefore it’s our responsibility. And so we said the best way to do that would be to develop a reporting app that we could bolt on to any gym owner’s website. It would track their revenues, create a dashboard for them, and then they in turn can turn around and report that to us. So we put about $70,000 into the first phase and then I realized like I don’t want to own a software company, and there are far better places that we can invest, and so from that experience we learned like you need to let the experts in software keep building software. Our job as the leader in the industry is really to set the standard and say, here’s what you should be providing and you know, we learned three or four months ago that we can do that. We proved it. We published a report on like what is the best member management software? When we published that report, we also said like, here’s the gold standard that every management software should meet. Here’s how to be a good member-management platform, in other words. And three or four of the of the companies that we worked with immediately said thanks for giving us a target. We’re going to step up, and made immediate improvements that, you know, maybe they’d never thought of before or maybe they even been processing for years, and just because it was coming from us, they took quick action and actually made things better for gym owners. And now I realize like that is a better initiative for us to pursue is to define what the gold standards are and give people a target to aim for.
Eden: 09:19 – So we did allude to it a little bit right now about the different challenges you’re facing. What do you see as probably the biggest challenge you’re facing?
Chris: 09:35 – Probably development as a leader. Like you know, fitness coaches have been largely led to believe that like being the best coach is going to give you the best business. And I think everybody listening to this podcast understands that’s not true. We all get it. Like it’s two completely different jobs. One is not an extension of the other. One is not like the second level of the first. Well what happens in Tinker Phase is now you have to become a leader to people whose job you don’t really understand well yourself. So when you’re in the Farmer Phase, yeah, you have to be a leader to the other coaches in your gym, but you’re a coach, right? You can relate to them, you know when they’re doing something right or wrong or you know, leveraging their time effectively, you know how to help them improve. And you also can tell when they’re frustrated because you’ve been there. When you get to Tinker Phase, though, you’re hiring people with areas of knowledge or specialization that are vastly greater than your own. And so you have to learn how to lead people based on what they care about instead of what they know. And that is very challenging for a left-brain guy like me who has to practice empathy instead of instead of a right-brain expert like you, that is tough, right? Like you have to learn how to read and also filter emotion out of things. So yeah, it requires a different type of mentorship. You know, the other challenges are really just I love great ideas and my brain is attracted to novelty and people pitch this stuff all the time. You know? I’ll put time and resources and money into that. And the other thing, too, is that a few years ago I was listening to some stuff by the Dalai Lama and kind of realized that the path to happiness is through service. And that’s when I wrote “Help First” and “Help First” was about marketing, but it was really about like how to be happy. And so my first instinct when I wake up in the morning, it’s 4:00 a.m., before I even like open both eyes, I’m checking my email. Because that is the most immediate opportunity to help first, is people sending me these questions. But that’s not where I should start my day.
Eden: 11:59 – So, given those challenges of leadership, how do you face that challenge?
Chris: 12:05 – Well, number one, I really rely on transparency and patience from my senior team, like, you know, you and the senior staff at Two-Brain, Danny, Jay, Mike our COO, Josh Price, Jeff Smith, John Franklin. You know, luckily you’re not all just big thinkers, but you’re also very generous with your time and patience. But at this level you need a ton of transparency. Like somebody has to tell me if they’re upset or mad or if I’ve said something that I didn’t mean, you know. So I have a mentor for that. Marci Swenson is my mentor right now. We spend an hour every single week working through leadership challenges one-on-one. And then on the focus front, I have a different mentor, Todd Harmon, and we work in like 90-day focal periods. So we basically like say this project is more important than everything else. We do an assessment at the start of the 90 days and we sprint on that one thing. And sprints are very, very powerful if you’ve got a very stable base to work from. If you don’t, it’s like you’re going to go sprint in the track, but your shoes aren’t tied, you know, like you’re going to have a big worse problem than you thought you did if you try to sprint. So, you know, luckily, I’m getting a lot of help focusing on projects, but that’s always my biggest challenge. And the third thing is actually just learning more about flow state and doing things that optimize flow state for me. So a lot of listeners know now that like I’m not doing CrossFit as much anymore. I still own a CrossFit gym. I still love it, but cycling gets me into flow state. Cycling is where I resolve most of my problems, on my bike, and I just couldn’t do it in CrossFit.
Eden: 13:50 – You can if Chris has been on a big bike ride, there’s a lot of profound stuff that comes up.
Chris: 13:50 – Well, maybe I’m just more calm. But like even senior team people that I speak with are like have you had a bike ride today? Cause they want to know who are they talking to, right?
Eden: 14:12 – And it sounds like another thing I don’t think you’ve really struggled with but it’s around changing people at the door. Hiring people who have more knowledge, more understanding of these situations themselves and you have to be willing to let them spread their wings.
Chris: 14:23 – That takes practice for sure. My ego got obliterated when our company almost went bankrupt back in 2008, and ever since then I’ve just really been like an open vessel.
Eden: 14:35 – That’s very nice. Another question coming to us often is that people are incredulous about the amount of content you produce and why you produce so much, how you produce so much, and I guess another question would be, do people really stay subscribed to these mail lists?
Chris: 14:58 – Yes. So the reason I started writing—and like we’re just past the 10-year anniversary of me blogging to help business owners every single day. So 10 years, something’s come out. The reason I started was to take notes to help myself and then quickly some reader feedback was like, this isn’t very helpful for your readers. You need to be more directive. You can’t just say don’t do this or this was a mistake. You have to say do this one thing. And so I learned that like, you know, almost a decade ago. So everyday that’s what I try to do. I try to help first by giving a directive solution that actually solves a problem. So instead of just talking about a problem or you know, complaining about something or saying, don’t do it this way, we, you know, it’s our ethos that we’re directive and we say, do this thing, follow these steps. And so every month we publish like a big guide, step by step, how to hire, how to pay your coaches, how to run the Intramural Open. It all really came out of a desire to solve gym owners’ problems because as a gym owner myself, it’s very easy for me to relate to like what they’re going through. So how do I do every day? Number one, it’s a habit, but then number two is we haven’t run out of problems to solve yet. And I literally can’t not do it. So, you know, the previous day I’ll get an email from somebody. Oh, my coach wants to quit because they can make more money as a substitute teacher. And so I’ll spend some time on the bike thinking about that and then, you know, the next morning that will be the love letter. I think a lot of people are surprised that the love letters aren’t always written two weeks in advance, you know, and most of the time their response is something that’s just come up. The habit that I’ve established is to have two windows during the day. One we call a focus window. One is more of like a ship window, get stuff done. I write about it in “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief,” basically like in your focus window you are doing the thing that moves your business forward. And Mike Michalowicz calls this the Queen Bee role in his book, “Clockwork.” But you know Todd Herman who I’m working with right now, something that he told me the other day really resounds here and that is when you’re in the Tinker Phase, there’s nothing in your email box that’s going to move your business forward. Everything in your email is people asking you to help them with something. And that’s an amazing gift. But that shouldn’t be your first focus. Like my primary responsibility is to the clients and staff at Two-Brain. It’s not to people who want to pitch me on a new supplement line. So I need to not answer my email first thing in the morning. I need to sit down and write. In the ship window, for me, always comes after exercise. I’m zoomed in, I’m focused. Sometimes I’m so focused that it’s like I forget to eat lunch because you know, I’m fresh off my bike, I’ve solved a few problems, I want to work through them. So if you can set up those two windows during the day, I think you can probably move your business forward. The real danger to entrepreneurs is staying very, very, very busy, but not doing anything that’ll actually make their business progress.
Eden: 18:11 – OK. So we touched on this about how you laser in, focus in really well by biking; what is another trick you use to stay focused? What have you used in the past that has worked?
Chris: 18:24 – Mentorship, number one. You know, so every quarter, every month, every week I’m on a call with a mentor and they’re saying like, what’s your priority right now? So writing has actually helped me focus a lot because when you type it slowly as I do, you actually have to think one word at a time, right? You can’t think in sentences, you can’t think in paragraphs anymore. You have to think one word at a time. And you also have to think about clarity. Like how can I say this in fewer words. And what that does is it structures your thoughts. So if I get up in the morning and I write, and for me it’s usually 750 to 2000 words, then for the rest of the day my thoughts flow in order. They’re not scattered all over the place. There’s some structure to what I’m doing. And that is basically like the mechanics of focus. If I don’t do that, then my thoughts are all over the place. I’ve got 50 browser windows open in my head and on the screen, and you know, I want to tell jokes, I want to be on Facebook and Slack and everything all at the same time. So cycling helps, absolutely. It helps put me in an emotional place to make important decisions, which is great. It helps give me clarity. Sometimes I’ve worked through problems on the bike. But really, writing every day gives me the structure stay focused. It’s flow state. If you want to—actually, OK. So if listeners want to download my free book about flow state and how to get into it and what it is you can go to twobrain.com/flow, get that book for free. I think it’s critical for every entrepreneur in every stage, but when you’re in Tinker you literally can’t not do that.
Eden: 20:18 – OK. So it sounds like meditation.
Chris: 20:25 – Yeah. Yeah. And the bike, you know. Meditation exists to organize your thoughts and remove the emotional lens through which you process things. Would you agree with?
Eden: 20:47 – Yeah.
Chris: 20:47 – OK. So the bike removes that emotional lens for me and writing organizes my thoughts.
Eden: 20:54 – OK. So some folks have benefited off you sharing all of the challenges, all the ups and downs, all the problems that you’ve faced in these last 10 years, so you’ve got a real retrospective to go back on, you’ve seen some of the problems they’ve faced and the problems you’ve faced, what’s the biggest mistake ?
Chris: 21:06 – There’s a few. So in the gym industry, I think it’s lack of focus—or sorry, lack of vision. So vision is knowing exactly what you want for your gym three years from now. It’s not like, what can I sell? It’s really what do you want this thing to be? And what that does is it gives you perspective on the tools that you’re using and the people that you’re hiring and also the clients you’re attracting. So the new thing in gyms now is that the marketing problem is solved. We know how to get people in the door. That has never occurred before. You know, in my 20-year career, nobody until the last two years has able to say, we can guarantee you five to 10 leads or 40 leads even a month. Right? Like that just didn’t happen. The problem is that that is such an attractive proposition. It’s so novel that a lot of people are focused just on that. And what they need to do is say, who do I want to attract to this gym? Who do I want to hang out with for the next five, 10 years? Who do I want on my team and what do we want to do for these people? If you’re just following somebody else’s vision, like Greg Glassman’s even, you’re always subject to the whims of what are they going to do? And that’s always going to leave you in a panic when that direction changes or that vision changes or it goes away. So you have to look at, you know, what do I want to provide here? What are the tools that I can use, you know, CrossFit is a tool that I use, boot camp is a tool that other people use. Nutrition is a tool that everybody should use. And then you want to say like, how does that look in practice? How will I deliver? So that’s one thing. The second thing is that, you know, in the business world, there’s always been the dark side, which is like the get-rich-quick scheme. It’s like the huckster standing down on the pier in Chicago doing three card Monte or like selling snake oil, right? And that has plagued entrepreneurship since the dawn of time, like either the first or the second entrepreneur, the first one was legit and the second was a rip-off. So in our path to make entrepreneurs wealthy, part of that path is to sell, you know, these snake-oil salesman, and these bad practices, the easy money stuff, right? And the big one that’s out there now honestly comes from Facebook marketing. So there are experts out there who tell you that to make a lot of money really, really quick, what you need to do is grab attention of your audience and basically compel them to buy. Now compel in this sense is a negative, right? You’re grabbing their attention through different means. You’re shuffling cards like the three-card Monte dealer. You’re sing the praises of the snake oil before you leave town.
Eden: 24:15 –
Chris: 24:19 – No, no. Here’s how it plays out though. And like our clients, I think, don’t fall into this category, but there are people selling these systems now. So it’s not just a matter of like selling snake oil. It’s like people are telling you how to sell us shit on a snake oil really, really fast. And so like what they’re telling you is like if you want to capture an audience quickly, you have to go after attention. And so instead of having your own ideas, publishing your own platform for 10 years, like that’s hard work, don’t do it, just attack somebody else. And it works. Honestly, you can grab a lot of attention by doing that. Thanks to like hashtagging and all that stuff online now. So you don’t actually have to have the foundation of material, you don’t have to have anything to tell people. All you have to do is tell them that this other thing is wrong, right? The very lesson that I learned 10 years ago, not to do, thankfully. A lot of people can do that now and some people have done that to CrossFit. People have done that to political leaders, right? Like you’re running for office right now, you can either build your own platform or you can attack the other person. And we know that it works. The problem is that those people don’t get reelected. Those people don’t change the nation or the world and they don’t have a long-term business. The thing is like what you actually need is some authenticity; you need to be able to say, do this thing. You need to be able to give directives. And before Mel Siff died, you know, he was getting attacked for talking about like different programming models and different periodization models. And really in hindsight it was nothing. But it was a big deal to me at the time. And what he told me was like, Chris, as soon as you plant a flag, people are going to start shooting. And that’s very very true. I just didn’t understand what their motivation was until now. I thought they were just jerks. Now I understand that it’s actually just a bad business strategy that the get-rich quick guys are gonna always be attracted to.
Eden: 26:27 – And try to make things polarized so people will agree with them.
Chris: 26:31 – Exactly. I mean if you listen to—I don’t want to get political here, but if you’ve listened to podcasts about like, why is the president on Twitter? These are the kinds of things that you’re going to hear. If you make polarizing statements, you force people to choose. And polarizing statements might not even be what you actually believe or what you actually teach. It just has to be like the exact opposite of what most people hold to be true. Exactly. Yes. You know, we see this locally with different businesses now, like the upstarts, instead of building their business through authentic help first and like “I have the best service, I have the best product,” what they’ll do is they’ll attack somebody that’s been in business for 30 years, and it always backfires. Like every single time. People are smart and they realize that person’s a jerk. I don’t want to work with them. We see it online too. You know, like, it’s funny like Instagram, people tag Two-Brain Business because they want to start an argument, and we’re not going to give them that because, we don’t have to. And what they want is attention. And like the greatest gift that I could give them would be to react to their garbage because that’s going to shine our huge spotlight on that and we’re just not going to do that. And it happens everywhere, and it always backfires because people are smart and over time they finally figure out like, wait, that person is selling snake oil or nothing at all. They’re just yelling. You know, when I started in mentorship or when I started a gym, there was a person selling like gym business advice and a box owner who I knew was paying him for it. And this box owner showed up at our gym for a competition and I was like, how do you work with this guy? Like he’s so abrasive and you’re all like—and this other gym owner said, well, I don’t have to like him to listen to what he said. That actually I thought doesn’t seem right to me. Like if this person doesn’t share my values, how can I possibly get anything from them? I’ll never take them seriously. And that person’s gone now. Like this business coach or whatever is largely regarded as a fraud. Something I said half an hour ago rings true here. It’s like you can change people’s minds, but you can never change how people feel. If you aren’t approaching situations with authenticity and teaching people in your community, like, here’s why you should squat and here’s why I care about you and here’s why I want to teach you this. If all you’re doing is blasting the Facebook posts and like making false promises and breaking your word or like attacking other people, you’re going to get attention, but you’re not going to have a business for very long.
Eden: 29:27 – So the biggest mistake is that people aren’t choosing to be more authentic.
Chris: 29:28 – Yeah. They’re chasing attention instead of providing authentic help first. It’s not a recipe that’s ever lasted a long time in any arena. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. I think that’s what they used to say, the hucksters down the boardwalk. It’s true in every business, you know, on every platform in every field.
Eden: 30:03 – So said there are several mistakes folks are making. That’s probably the biggest one. Are there any additional mistakes you want to help explain right now?
Chris: 30:12 – I think it’s—this is a very innocent mistake and I’m guilty too. It’s like entrepreneurship is cool now and there’s so much information out there. So many ideas. Most of them are good, that the big mistake is just try all these things all at once and start a whole bunch of things and not finish anything, or not like try one thing at a time and test it, you know? So, fitness trainers listen to this podcast a lot. And when a client comes in, they start seeing some results and they immediately jump on like a stack of supplements, right? They got creatine, they got protein, they’re doing the workouts, it’s the first time you’ve ever touched the barbell, it’s the first time they’ve ever run 3k, and they’re losing weight, right? Well what caused them to lose the weight? What was it one of those things? You don’t know. Like you have to control your variables. So, that’s very hard to do. There’s just so many great ideas online. So most of the time when gym owners get on free calls with us now, they don’t say, I have no idea what to do. What they say is like, I’m doing everything. I’m on Instagram, on Facebook and you know, I’ve got ads rolling now, I’m trying to put stuff on YouTube. And the reason I wrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” was to give them like a lens on what do they need to be doing depending on which phase of entrepreneurship they’re in. Because the answer changes.
Eden: 31:37 – So for everyone listening, don’t try all the things at once, slowly add layers after you’ve tested gradually.
Chris: 31:46 – Yeah, take action on one thing all the way through. Finish it, test it before you start working on the next thing. You know, the reason that most people do that is doubt. They don’t have complete confidence that what they’re testing right now is going to help. So that’s why they’re testing 50 things at once, but they’re not actually doing a good job on any of them. And, you know, entrepreneurial confidence is a huge problem. In the fitness industry it’s very easy to start a gym. So you’re overconfident at the beginning. Then you realize it’s very hard to keep a gym open and you lose confidence so quickly that by the time we meet people a lot of the time their confidence is gone in, and we wonder like, how is this person going to make the hard changes they have to? This is where a mentor really comes in. Like you’ve got to help give the person back enough confidence to give them some quick wins that they start seeing progress. And like I’ll tell you, the people who go through the Incubator who see those quick wins build up the confidence. They’re the ones who eventually do the hard things that make them really successful. The people who start the Incubator and they don’t see the quick wins, they don’t build up that confidence, they’re generally so burned out that they can’t do the very hard things or they don’t do them all the way or they don’t commit. And you know, at the end of the Incubator, they’re treading water, they’re making more money, but they haven’t actually solved the root of the problem. And that’ what we’re always working to fix.
Eden: 33:22 – So in your experience, mentorship came along at that time when you were struggling, but you turned over your confidence in this guy even though you weren’t sure if he was gonna have great ideas for you or not.
Chris: 33:32 – So I mean, you know, I joked before that I’m an open vessel, but what had to happen was that that vessel had to empty first, and it was full of ego. So, you know, I thought, I’m smart. I’m going to figure this out. Or I can work harder than anybody else. You know, I’m going to make this business successful just through my own martyrdom and nobody’s going to outwork me. That was like a mantra. And that all had to fail and it like had to impact my self-esteem, my life, my marriage, everything before I was finally willing to say like, I’m going to listen to somebody else.
Eden: 34:14 – So it doesn’t have to be that way necessarily.
Chris: 34:16 – No, no. I’m just more stubborn than anybody else.
Eden: 34:22 – But that is the role of the mentor, right, is to help give you that clarity and structure so you do focus on one thing at the exclusion of other things.
Chris: 34:35 – Yeah. Like the meta picture that a lot of people pick up on is well, you know, Chris and the team gave me some early, some easy things to do at first and when they’ve finished the Incubator, this light bulb goes off like, oh my God, OK, I get it. And because we’re teaching them to do that in their gyms first, like the most important thing when somebody visits your gym on day one is that they leave thinking, I can win at CrossFit. OK. Or I can win at this thing. I can be good at this. It’s not, wow, now I know something new. And it’s definitely not, wow, I’m in worse shape than I thought. You’re not going to impress people with knowledge, right? Because you can’t change the way they feel, you can just change what they think. So what you have to do is leverage the way that they feel and show them you can feel better. You have to do that on day one. So we do that with business owners too. Like just quick wins in the Incubator. They start feeling really good. They’re getting that whole candy crush thing. I’m leveling up. I’m addicted now. I can’t stop. Oh my God, I can’t wait to raise rates. I can’t wait to tell my landlord I want—you know. They keep leveling up into harder levels and they need to start with success, because motivation follows success, not the other way around.
Eden: 35:56 – Great. Thank you very much for your time. It was really great to talk about these topics and dig into some big things here, and you’ve given us a good perspective on how mentorship has helped you and how Founders can level up to Founders and beyond.
Chris: 36:15 – Thanks, Eden.
Greg: 36:19 – Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com
Greg Strauch will be here every Thursday with the Two-Brain Radio Podcast.
Two-Brain Marketing episodes come out Mondays, and host Mateo Lopez focuses on sales and digital marketing.
On Wednesdays, Sean Woodland tells the best stories in the CrossFit community on Two-Brain Radio With Sean Woodland.
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