Episode 156: Building Kids' Programs In Your Gym

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Greg Strauch:                        01:10                       All right. I’m here with Jason Rule, owner of Driven nutrition. Jason, how are you?

Jason Rule:                             01:15                       I’m good. Thanks for having me on Greg. I appreciate it.

Greg Strauch:                        01:18                       Happy to. I know personally within my gym, I love the products that Driven nutrition has been able to offer us. I would say as a business owner, I love the profit margins as well. Uh, before we get into all that, let’s kind of start with your story. Let’s start with kind of what led you up to open driven nutrition and uh, Kinda expand and we’ll go from there.

Jason Rule:                             01:37                       All right. Right on. We’ll dive into it. So about 20 years ago, I bought my first supplement store and then shortly after that, about a year after that, about another one and got pretty entrenched inside of the supplement industry working with the franchisees. And what I found in the industry was a lot of times a company will come out of nowhere, build itself up, and then start charging a lot higher premium for their product or they’ll start selling out the people, the businesses that actually built them. So after about three years of doing that, I decided to open my own shingle and I figured, okay, at least I can control if I, if I start my own brand, I can control not only the quality of products but retail distribution as well as the wholesale price of it. So not having to worry about a manufacturer’s undercutting me or anything like that.

Jason Rule:                             02:30                       And that rolled around, that was about 14 years ago when I started tight. And, and then once crossfit came about, some of the supplements, uh, took a big jump again cause people started focusing on health and wellness and all that. But as crossfit gyms started reaching out to us saying, hey, we’d like to carry your product lines. I kept hearing over and over again, we don’t care if we make a profit, we just want a really good product offer our members. That struck a chord with me because that’s really how, well, that’s not exactly how I ran my company, but I’m a big believer in there’s no amount of money that’s worth giving up your reputation for. So when someone came into my stores, I trained all of my guys like, Hey, these are the products that we recommend for these situations. We’re not here just to make a buck or to sell a product, but instead to help these guys achieve their goals.

Jason Rule:                             03:21                       So the compassion and the, and the relationship that crossfit gyms had with their members really compelled to me. But it scared me really bad cause they’re saying I don’t care if I make a profit. So you know, keep in mind, this was seven years ago, I was flat out telling people like, look dude, you just bought a hobby. If you’re doing something for the sake of just, hey, I want to do this cause my members are telling me I should do it, then you should generate revenue from it and not, you shouldn’t do it. Focus on a part of a business that can be profitable, that can drive the metrics forward. So we worked with, we worked with a handful of gems and we just basically said, look, if we created a brand that was exclusive for affiliates, what would you need? And of course they started with protein, you know that it needs to taste great, it needs to be amazed and he said mix easily and it just needs to be a really straight forward product.

Jason Rule:                             04:10                       So we started with that and then amino acids, a creatine, glutamine, fish oil and nighttime sleep aid and recovery product, post workout, pre workout. The list goes on and on and now we’re up to 60 or 70 different products. And as we started developing the products, it stayed in the back of my mind. It’s not just the products that these affiliates need, but it’s the support and the training. And I caution to say this, permission to make a profit. And you know that at the time there were, there were some brands in the space, but they were, they were very expensive and there’s only so long you can overcharge for a commodity. And that’s what, that’s what supplements are, their commodities, you know, I’ll be at high grades depending on what company you work with, but they are, they are commodities. So eventually if you’re charging a lot of money for a product that a member can walk into a local retailer for and buy for 30 or $40, eventually the koolaid wears off a little bit and then like, oh, it’s proteins protein.

Jason Rule:                             05:12                       Right? Well that’s a tough business model. If the prices are really high, it’s just not something that can be sustained. So the, besides the teaching and the, the approaches that we take to retail of teaching Jim’s how to create a successful business unit. Inside of that, we wrap it around a model that allows the affiliates to sell the products at a reasonable price point. In fact, a lot of our affiliates will sell it a little bit below our retail price. So you’ll find our products on our, on our website as well as on our Amazon store and that’s at full blown retail and I encouraged the affiliates to sell it just a little bit below our retail price point. Then that way you can say as an added value of being a member of our gen, we’re proud to be able to save you money on these products.

Greg Strauch:                        05:58                       Yeah. Which is usually a different approach that a majority of supplement companies we’ll talk about with the people that are going to be supplying the supplements to the members. They definitely don’t, don’t do, don’t do that same justice that you guys do have of really making sure that they’re getting the benefit of being able to carry the products within their facilities. Right, right. So you guys take a different approach to onboarding. Anyone that, that, that decides to start with driven, what does that onboarding process look like?

Jason Rule:                             06:28                       Well, it uh, anybody who is interested, they can go to our website and fill out the form to become an affiliate. And then the next step is we’ve got a gate there intentionally. The next step is for them to schedule a call with me and then we jam for 1530 minutes to see if we’re a good fit. And we go over the process of how do I talk to my members about supplements? How do I come off as though I’m not being salesy and you know, and then how do I talk to my members as well as my coaches about it? And how do I make it part of my community and what we do here. So it’s kind of laying out that overall framework. And then we have emails that kind of are follow the bouncing ball. Everything from a script that an affiliate can use to post up when they first announced about it to a coach’s newsletter that has 60 to 70 different emails.

Jason Rule:                             07:15                       And, and in that we just drip emails to the coaches every seven to 10 days. And that’s a mistake that I made early on. A couple years back, I realized some of my onboarding calls were taking two and a half hours. And not only was I getting hungry during these things, but I, you know, the trickle down the lane, there’s only so much information you can absorb in and a certain amount of time. And what I found was, hey, I could create, I can create an article. So I started documenting our processes like any good business will. I mean, you guys do a great job of teaching that. And I was just winging it. You know, here’s what I know about retail. And I was just puking all over it.

Jason Rule:                             07:55                       And uh, so I started documented like, here’s, here’s a ball, just follow it. And we, we integrated that into infusion soft that we use for followup and it just kind of follow the bouncing ball and um, hopefully, uh, we’ve done a good job. I always say, hopefully because I believe that we’re just one version away from being better and that includes whatever version we just made that’s better. Uh, so we’re constantly improving those processes that here’s how you introduce products to members, here’s how you introduced it to coaches and here’s how you create a successful business unit inside of your gym. Instead of just buying products to help us pay for the products you take yourself, it should be a profitable venture.

Greg Strauch:                        08:36                       Agreed. Agreed. And with that, I mean, you guys do even more unique things with, with the onboarding, but also with a presales. I know, uh, Bryan Alexander did this and in what kind of interests me into driven was the fact that you guys do more of like a preorder. So if is buying shirts

Jason Rule:                             08:56                       or other kinds of apparel companies kind of do this, hey, put out a list, let everyone kind of pick what they need and then a kind of forward that to you guys with payment to get, get the order placed. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Brian. Brian crushed it and he actually helped us develop the sop is for it. I was sitting there at my desk and I heard the printer just go and go and go on and had like an $8,000 order and I just picked up the phone. I said, what did you just do? It said all, I’ve been building up for that for a couple months. And I was like, okay, we need to hop on a call. And that’s one of the things that I do is if a, if an affiliate is crushing something, I’ll hop on a call, I’ll record it, and then I’ll turn it into a podcast and they’ll spread that out to the rest of our affiliates.

Jason Rule:                             09:34                       Then that way we can all kind of get up to speed and also accelerate, you know, the hive mind mindset. So we, we took what Brian was doing and then we implemented that into not only an email series but also a mini cha using Facebook messenger. You know you mentioned doing things different, I call it weird, you know, things that stand out that kind of make people go, what was that? What did I just look at? I get real heavy into Facebook messenger and so we have a link then an affiliate you can click on and then it’s just basically a follow the bouncing ball, nine day process of here’s what you post, here’s what you say, here’s the links to the assets that you need. And then nine days later you, you have this big list of members that need products and you go place the order.

Jason Rule:                             10:19                       And then two days later you’d get the order and disburse it out and you have profit in the bank. And that’s amazing to be able to do, cause I’ve, I first handed been able to do that and allow for us to have excellent margins on our products in the industry. There’s definitely different models throughout supplementation of how people should, should be selling it and all that kind of stuff. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between what driven has done compared to maybe the conventional business model of supplements? Uh, sure. I mean that’s part of the reason that we, we created a new brand completely out of by driven nutrition instead of taking the original brand than we had and saying, hey, here’s, here’s a traditional southern, that company, you know, it’s normally dealing with body builders, fitness competitors, weight loss, that type of thing.

Jason Rule:                             11:05                       And a lot of those companies were advertising at crossfitters as well as at owners. You know, some went directly to the gyms, they have sales forces for wholesale and everything else and then they will call you and hey Greg, are you looking at selling some supplements? Sure, send me some samples and then they hound you and pound you until you either buy or die. And we don’t, we don’t do that. We, we’ve grown strictly by word of mouth. And part of that was through being broke and you know, simply through desperation of hey, we can’t, the margins that we have that aren’t anywhere near what the affiliate can have. So we had to get more creative with how, how we grew our brands. So you know, working with affiliates, one of the first things I tell them, and I encouraged, I can encourage affiliates to do the same thing, is I expect to do such a good job for you that when somebody says, Hey, what do you do for some months?

Jason Rule:                             11:55                       Or what are you selling your gym? It’s a flat out. If you’re not working with Jason had driven, you are missing the boat. And I know that by saying that, then I’m, then I’m establishing the level of quality that you as an affiliate expect. So if, if we ever drop the ball, if we screw up, if we mess up an order or we can improve our process, you know, all of all of the affiliates we work with have my cell phone and I expect a text like, Hey Jason, you’re dropping the ball or you could do a better job here. And if it’s something that is possible or within with our, in our abilities to learn than we, we build it and then we implement it and then we test it. So I think that, you know, working directly in with affiliate owners and letting them know, like you’re the, you’re the ones growing our brand. You’re the ones that are, that are talking to your members, that you’re the ones that are trusting that when you sell them one of our products, that they are getting a good product. So we’ve, we’ve stayed very loyal to that and we rely on the affiliates to help us spread the word because I don’t think there’s anything like what we do.

Greg Strauch:                        12:57                       No I I 100% agree and I can attest to anyone out there listening to this podcast that a, I do have your cell phone number in my phone and if anything like that does come up. Definitely being able to reach out to you, which is unique because it’s not like you can reach out to a lot of other supplement companies. Their CEOs are even have their cell phone number to say, Hey I need help with this. Or Hey I think the system could be streamlined this way or that way and giving you feedback directly. So that’s definitely a unique thing that you’re able to do and continue doing at a high level with, with all the other things that you currently do within the business and still be able to keep that personal touch with affiliate owners and gym owners.

Jason Rule:                             13:36                       Well for me it’s very honestly it’s self serving because we serve the affiliates and if I, if I build a wall between you guys and I don’t have that line of communication, then I’m just going and I’m going to start mentoring stuff as far as what is my opinion is that everybody should be doing instead of listening to what are the best ones out there doing. We can just move a lot faster altogether. Then we can just individually, so for, it’s part of it’s lazy by me is I don’t want to have to think of all this cool stuff that everybody’s doing out there. I just want to be able to take it and be like, hey man, good job. How do we, how do we duplicate that this out with, you know, a thousand other affiliates.

Greg Strauch:                        14:13                       Yeah, definitely. Now you guys have the typical supplements. You have the protein, you have the BCA A’s, but you have some unique supplements to. Can you expand a little bit on some of the stuff that is kind of outside of the normal protein and bcas that that most Shim cell?

Jason Rule:                             14:32                       Yeah. You know, our top sellers are two bound protein. Then we’ve got posed quad, we’ve got prewired, which is a lot of, lot of crossfit gyms and not a lot. I’d say some of them are like, no, I don’t want to sell preworkout great. So another product we have is called disrupt. So it’s our branch chain amino acids. It’s BCAS plus one gram of an energy formula. So you know it has about 120 milligrams of caffeine. So not enough to really give you much energy at all, but it’s just kind of a smooth, smooth product that you can take to help increase pain tolerance. So there’s no pump product. You know, if you’re doing a metcon or something like that, you don’t want your heart rate up if you’re doing a long rowing, you don’t want to get a pump in your legs. So disrupt as a cool product that really doesn’t fit the, the space of normal supplements.

Jason Rule:                             15:16                       But it falls into the crossfit space. Well along with post one. And then, you know, we got into, Jeez man, Greg, we’ve got, I think we’ve got 60, close to 60 some odd skews just with, and that’s just products. And then you get into apparel, you know, shirts, uh, men’s shorts, uh, ladies shorts, you know, and all of those are brand. And we set those up at a pass through cost. Some affiliate can sell our apparel and generate a really solid revenue stream. And then, you know, when somebody is thinking that they need to take a protein or something like that and they see a coach or an owner, other members walking around driven nutrition tee shirts, what are they going to buy? You’re going to buy what everybody else does. So that’s one way that we kind of help drive interest into the brand and keep that, keep that internal marketing going without a lot of effort from the affiliate owner.

Jason Rule:                             16:04                       So apparel is great. And then, I don’t know, lower year ago I created a, a good relationship with Charlotte’s web who’s the industry leader in CBD. In fact, they’re the ones that created the, the rush for CBD. You know, Satya gooped in 2014 the an expo say on them called weed, and he documented the, the medical refugee crisis that was happening in Colorado of people hearing about CBD and what it was doing for these, the two first patients, Charlotte figgy and a Secai Jackson. So this, these Stanley brothers or seven of them, they started as Stanley brothers, his name of it, and eventually that the name got out so much about of what it was doing for Charlotte figgy that they ended up naming their entire company Charlotte’s web off of the strain of him that they were growing. So as I started looking into it for personal reasons, there was a lot of misinformation.

Jason Rule:                             17:03                       It reminded me of, it reminded me a lot of when a new supplement comes out and there’s all this amazing sexy marketing on it, and that just makes me raise an antenna of bullshit antenna like that doesn’t make any sense there. So I started digging into it and digging into it, digging into it, and every, every form that I found, everybody that actually was needing CBD for what, what they consider medical reasons, whether it’s dealing with epilepsy or depression, PTSD, that type of thing. Every, every legitimate source that I found was pointing to Charlotte’s web. And the more I dug into the company and more I realized like all of these other companies are private labeling their buy in bulk oil from Israel, from China, where China, you can, you can pet spend 100 bucks and get an organic certification. There’s no validity to it whatsoever.

Jason Rule:                             17:54                       So the market, you know, the big CVD market that is, is what it is now was scaring me a year and a half ago because there’s, you know, there’s no one at the wheel of this industry except for Charlotte’s web because they grow. So every, every bottle that is produced comes from the exact same strand of him. So if you can imagine the Fido chemical properties of a plant, it’s going to vary from one batch to another. Hemp is such a, such an untapped market that we still have unique strains. And that’s what these guys did was they, they, they bred this strain up until it’s CBD content was higher than anything else I’ve ever found were a lot of times, you know, four years ago, everybody was growing hemp plants to increase the TNC to get people more high. They had read these studies in the sixties about what CBD can do and the studies are coming from Israel and you know, what the endocannabinoid system is and you know, uh, all of that, we can spend hours talking about CBD.

Jason Rule:                             18:53                       But these guys believed in the benefits of it. So they started breeding this strain that they own that genetics for now. And not only do the hand plant every plant in Colorado on their own farm, but the hand cultivated. So there’s no synthetic pesticides, no synthetic fungicides or anything like that. And in the end product, every batch, every product is exactly the same, has the same fido chemical properties. And you know, the scary thing about CBD, the scary thing about hemp oil is hemp as a reclamation plant. Uh, what that means is, is they’ll plant it around like mining operations, uh, to pull the, pull the contaminants out of the soil to get the, to get the, to get the levels out to where they’re not going to get sued by the EPA. Well, I mean, like, uh, in Japan, after Hiroshima was bombed, they planted him all over the place to pull the radiation on the soil.

Jason Rule:                             19:46                       Now it’s going, it’s coming out of the soil, but it’s going into the plant. So if you’ve taken, if you take these huge roomfuls of hemp, grinded up that have been grown in less than stellar conditions are polluted conditions, all of those contaminants are going to be inside those plants. And now they’re getting to get this entire roomful of him is going to get processed and put inside these two gallons of oil. So now you’ve got an incredibly concentrated level of contaminants. And so instead of doing what a lot of well a lot of companies do is, you know, buying raw products, putting your label on it, I felt I was really doing a disservice to the industry. But more than that, our clients, because I can’t make a better product than Charlotte’s web.

Greg Strauch:                        20:28                       Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say, so you basically turned around and said, okay, if gym owners are, are selling supplements and this is something that can benefit them, which we can go into the benefits of, of their members in them of what CBD oil can do. But because you couldn’t develop a better product to, you wanted to get the best of the best, which was, uh, what Charlotte’s web was.

Jason Rule:                             20:48                       Right, right. Or his right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, you know, the CBD concentration is a factor of seven times stronger than most of the other brands out there. And it’s the same price point. The cost per CBD mall milligram is a fraction of most brands. So an affiliate, I’ve had affiliates bring it in, you know, one of the, you know, we talk about how do we, how do we promote it, how do we do all that? And a lot of times affiliates will, we’ll spend a lot of time researching and everything allows to get like that. I’m really just teaching affiliates. Hey, if you can get out of here, get out of the numbers way and like just make it available, ask them a question. So one of the ways that we taught affiliates early on to to see if it was a good fit was I took a picture of the bottle and then I just put this question mark on it.

Jason Rule:                             21:31                       And so I sent affiliates of the script and said, ah, just post this, post the picture and say, do you take CBD oil and why? And then listen, listen to your members. Uh, we had, we had one gem get 37 comments on it. Yeah. Like, I mean like do Murph, you’ll get that many comments or program, a three mile run for time. You know, you’ll get a bunch of comments. But people, now, this has been a year and a half since we’ve been into it, but when we first started it was pretty divided. You know, people were passionate about it one way or the other and um, you know, that that is starting to die down. The acceptance of it and everything else. People are starting to realize this product doesn’t get you high. You know, there’s not enough THC in it to do anything. Psychoactively but there are benefits that, that people are getting.

Greg Strauch:                        22:15                       Yeah. I like to always say to people that are worried about that with, with the being in CBD oil. I say it’s a, it’s about the equivalent of the alcohol in Cambridge show. Jay Is, I mean it’s fermented tea. It’s going to technically, but nobody’s drinking that and a drinking and driving. So it’s like that. It’s, yes, technically it could have a trace in there, but it’s such a, such a minor level that it will, you could drink the whole thing and I’m pretty sure it’s still wouldn’t cause that much of an effect. But I mean, and, and CBE CBD you can get into to the benefits if they do have members that are taking this or don’t know about it. What, what exactly are the benefits that people that would be telling their, their members of what this could do?

Jason Rule:                             22:59                       You know, there, we have to be careful with, um, you can tell stories, you can say why people take it. But you can’t say that it’s fixing it because then you get into, then you’re telling people that it is a medication and that’s, that’s really, that’s another reasons that we work with. We decided to work with Charlotte’s web is I want us to make sure that we’re staying on the right side of, of this particular industry because right now the pharmaceutical company, they were able to produce one CBD product. Apple dialax I believe is the name of it, so if, if we as an industry of people who are offering as well as gems that are offering CBD and hemp oil and then they start saying, well, this can cure this or this can cure that. They really get themselves in a tough spot of where they’re prescribing and unapproved medication.

Jason Rule:                             23:48                       I’d be doing everybody a disservice to answer that question. What I will do is there’s, there’s a nonprofit and we talked about this before we got on the call. Greg is, it’s called the realm of caring. The t h e r o c. Dot. US. It is the best source that is available on the planet that I’ve found of. What are the studies and what are the studies pointing to for different conditions? What impact does CBD and humble having on these and out of out of the studies that have been done and it’s, it’s, there’s a huge library, like you can go to the resource and there’s, there’s hundreds of conditions that studies have been done and they’re linked up on there. So I would recommend any affiliate, use that as a resource not only for to learn about, but also if a member has a question, plugged them into it.

Jason Rule:                             24:35                       Since since we work with Charlotte’s web, who was one of the original founders of who was the founder of the realm of caring. Now it’s a nonprofit that works with other oil companies and it recommends other hemp oil companies. But since we’re connected to that, our gym can use the realm of caring. Our gyms can use the realm of caring as a resource to pick up the phone, to hand the phone to a member and say, hey, you’re dealing with this condition. Please reach out to them and have these conversations. And the beautiful thing is, is the real caring is run by people who have dealt with, you know, sick kids. They’ve been sick themselves, they’ve used these products. And so no matter what condition someone is dealing with, they have people who have dealt with that themselves and they’re able to plug you in to that resource so you can use it. So I, I’ll the, I believe that on better serving everyone that’s listening to this, by sending them in that direction, then doing what all these other companies are doing of, Hey, this is what CBD oil does or cures this or cures that. There’s, that’s not doing the industry any justice.

Greg Strauch:                        25:38                       Yeah, no, I agree. We definitely appreciate that. We’ll make sure we link that in the show notes so that everyone, if they’re doing the research for that, and that’s just one of the products that you guys have to offer that’s a little bit more unique because a, a lot of supplement companies aren’t going in any other route, uh, besides the protein, the preworkout, um, possibly even the creatine. But even further into that, you guys, I mean, let’s, uh, let’s talk about a unique product. I remember at the summit last year, you brought it up. You were, you were, you were eating a bag of them and we’re a little confused on what they were, but I think it’s called the meat snacks. Is that correct?

Jason Rule:                             26:11                       Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Um, so I made snacks is made from chicken isolat. So this, this company not too far from us. In fact, if you buy Campbell’s soup or any, any type of a chicken bullion, anything, it comes from this company and what they, what they were trying to do is figure out how, so as they’re refining chicken processing chicken, they had some byproduct, which was chicken protein. So they’ve started refining the process of chicken protein isolate and then having this, this powder, which it doesn’t sound very, and by itself it’s not, um, you know, just basically it’s, it’s cooked chicken with very little seasoning or anything like that, but it has unbelievable health benefits. Chicken is one of the highest things in branch chain amino acids products out there by a factor of almost two. So chicken protein has some great benefits for athletes.

Jason Rule:                             27:02                       So as they started developing products, I started buying these meat snacks. So I, last year I set a goal, I wanted to travel and go to five different events or masterminds or anything like that. And as I travel, I don’t like eating crappy meals, Mcdonald’s, anything like that. So I try to control, okay, I need a snack here, I need a snack there. So I was traveling with these things and, and eating them. I was eating three or four days sometimes when I would travel. And I was like, these are delicious. So created a relationship with the company and said, hey, we’d like to offer these to our affiliates. And um, and we do. So when we, the thing is when we create those relationships with the affiliates or with these companies, we’ve been very careful to vet them. Uh, not only from the standpoint of their Ra’s and their products, but their business. What’s their business goals? Do they align with ours? And is this something that, that their members are going to be able to buy it? The costs that they’re getting an ad and a few months. If so, I tell people flat out, look, if that’s the path you’re going down, let’s, let’s just part friends because we’re not going to get along and it’s not going to go well if you start selling us out and our, and our retail partners,

Greg Strauch:                        28:10                       which is very unique because I mean supplements, you’re looking at margins and you’re looking at what you guys are able to make and look in numbers really is what it comes down to. And that’s definitely a different take that you guys go about within the industry of it’s not chasing the money, it’s more of chasing what’s going to benefit the end user the most. Along with the gym owner, the, the crossfit affiliate owner.

Jason Rule:                             28:33                       It’s a, it’s a lot longer game. You know, there’s not, there’s not a flash in the pan. We’re not looking for instant revenue, um, incident profits. You know, we’re, we’re in this for the long haul and it’s, you know, the crossfit owners that were telling us six or seven years ago, you know, I don’t care if I make a profit, I just want a good product off of my members. Um, we just kind of flipped that on its head a little bit, but I know how, how are trusting, you know, a lot of these guys are past military firefighters, law enforcement. My Dad’s a retired highway patrolmen. My brother’s a trooper. I got a nephew that’s a trooper, another one that’s going into it and Kansas. And you know, I just grew up with that mindset of, you know, tell people what you’re going to do and then do it.

Jason Rule:                             29:11                       And then crossfit goes a step farther of that vitality of, hey, this is, this is really unique. This can help your business. And then, you know, there’s been a lot of consultants that have come out and they’re saving a lot of these gems by teaching them how to make profit. And, um, and thankfully I’m grateful that they’re helping us spread the word as far as, hey, this is what driven does pay attention to them and you don’t have to sell supplements, but if you do, I feel that uh, driven is probably the best model out there. I hope.

Greg Strauch:                        29:42                       And coming from an experience, I mean we’re almost five years in now, uh, with me owning the gym and I can definitely tell you that, uh, it’s, it’s the way the process you guys have made, um, which is what I want to get into next of somebody being able to onboard with you to the point of selling the supplements and how easy you guys make it. Almost like a plug in play to do along with, I mean, looking at it from a business standpoint, the margins that you make on the products are, I’ve yet to see something better and we can break down the difference between, I mean, whey protein and the different types of it and casein protein and all these other things of what’s going to be the most beneficial. But you guys do a great job of not only instituting a learning process of what you guys have and how to show what to offer so that people don’t have to go out and do the research themselves if they haven’t yet.

Greg Strauch:                        30:33                       But you guys sell top notch supplement. So it’s not like you guys are going to the the guy, like you said before, with the oils of, of going to like China and getting a bulk order of, of, of protein. You guys are actually making it and manufacturing it to the highest possible quality all the time. Right, right. I appreciate you saying, saying all of that. Yeah. You know, I, I mentioned that earlier. A lot of affiliate owners, we’ll try to learn everything that casein does or everything that fish oil does or what do I mean? I’ll acids do. And the truth is a lot of your guys as members are already taking and buying supplements. They’re just not buying them from you either because you don’t offer them. The products you offer are that, some of them don’t taste good. Right? So it has to taste good.

Jason Rule:                             31:16                       It has to taste like reward or it’s priced outside of what the other markets do with that specific product. Um, so we, we kind of focus on instead of, hey, instead learn everything in that a branch chain amino acid can do, just make it available to your members, find a product and this is, this is true of any retail. Find a product that you believe in and if it’s something that you can generate a good enough profit on to make it worth your while, make it available to them and then talk about it. Let your members know this is what you take. You don’t have to know everything about amino acids. You just have to say, hey, this is what I take. This is why I take it. This is what I perceive when I take it. And then let them taste it. If you, if you do those things and you have it on your shelves, they’ll buy it

Jason Rule:                             31:58                       without a doubt. And I think, uh, something that I’ve always done and I’ve stuck to and my head coach still make sure, um, that my GM follows this as well, is the fact that we’re never going to sell a supplement or product that we don’t personally take or willing to take something, whether it’s a workout or it’s a amino acid or protein. Everything that we have on our shelves is stuff that we take and our coaches take and we believe in. And I think that’s something that you guys also have a line in. I remember you saying it plenty of times of, and I’m not going to sell a supplement that I’m not willing to take or that I haven’t taken that I enjoy taking too because I mean supplements are supplementation. So it’s, and that’s, that’s awesome to be able to have an that care in there. So let’s say somebody right now is listening to this and they’re like, you know what? I needed to talk to Jason. I need to figure out how I can institute this. The onboarding process, you said that they sign up online on the website, which we’ll put in the show notes, there’s a link for that. But what is, what does that onboarding process look like for somebody coming on with

Jason Rule:                             33:00                       driven nutrition? Well, first thing I’d do is ask them, are you carrying supplements now? What have you carried in the past of what worked? Then that way I can get a feel for kind of where they are as far as business, you know, do we need to break down some, some preconceived notions about making a profit first of all. And uh, and then the other thing is just plugging them into the, the emails of here’s, here’s the system that you follow. And you know, once we throw the switch, all ordering goes through our website, which is very convenient. There are no spreadsheets. So when you need to order something, you just hop on the website and you order at will. There’s no volume discounts. I don’t believe in that at all. I think that I want to work with a gym that has 10 members.

Jason Rule:                             33:40                       Then that way when they have 300, they will never change because they knew from day one that, that, that we were there with them. And I had businesses when I had stores that, that were that way. Um, it always, it always aggravated me when people, as I got bigger and more successful companies would come out of the woodworks, you know, it’d be like, Hey, your movements and volume, let’s increase this and then you can, you know, we can increase your margin. Like, you know, those products don’t cost you any lesson in your warehouse. Why? Why are you charging me less? I needed, I needed a profit when I was broke, man. So, you know, we don’t have minimums. Pricing goes, you know, pricing is, it’s flat and simple and you just get on the website and order whenever you need to.

Greg Strauch:                        34:20                       That process is super easy to you guys. Definitely take the leg work out of, out of trying to figure out how to do everything. I mean you guys have that affiliate separate log into, uh, which, which makes it super easy for people to jump on in and order what they need to.

Jason Rule:                             34:33                       Right. And then, um, you know, that we go through kind of the, how do we introduce this to the members? You know, talking about the first introduction, you know, do you order samples or do you order a handful of products? Uh, I’m a firm believer that samples do nothing but delay a purchasing decision. You know, if I hand you a sample and say, here you go bro, let me know what you think, you know. And then in a couple of days I see a, hey Greg, what did you think of the products? And like a, you know, things are going to get awkward cause you haven’t tried it or your dog ate it. It fell between the cracks, your seat, you know, instead on day one, like here, Greg would just getting in this protein, let me grab a scoop, go grab four or five ounces of water, throw it and shake it up. Let me know what you think and you’re going to buy that product that day if you like it.

Greg Strauch:                        35:14                       Yeah. I think, Jeff Burling had the chocolate peanut butter. And uh, I was like, all right, let me try it. Like I’ve had chocolate peanut butter proteins and he was like, man, I love this stuff. Like I can’t, I can’t keep it on the shelf and I’m buying it personally. And I tried it and I was like, Yep, that’s a, that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Um, that’s awesome. So if somebody wants to reach out to you guys, um, what’s the best way to contact you if they want to start up or if they have general questions for you guys? What’s the best way?

Jason Rule:                             35:45                       Uh, well, I’m on Facebook and my name is Jason Rule. You can reach out to me personally if we’re not friends. Um, and they hit my spam. So it may be a better idea to go to the Driven Nutrition page and then send a message that way. We do not have a wholesale price list. I’ll warn you ahead of time. Um, we do not send out samples. So the process to learn more information and we keep those behind the gate intentionally. So if he remembers or you have a coach that’s going rogue or somebody selling, wanting to sell products out of their garage, we don’t send that information out. So you fill out the, become an affiliate form. And then once we see that we’re a good fit and then I open the gates and you’re able to access the wholesale information. And then, uh, another way that you can do that, that I think any Jim could benefit from and should is we have a Facebook group called building retail in your box.

Jason Rule:                             36:31                       And we try to, you know, like on this call, I try to stay very agnostic as far as, you know, as far as brand, anything that we teach can be applied to any brand that you have in your gems. So, even if you’re not wanting to jump on board with a driven in building retail in your box and take some of those steps and implement them, you know, recreate some of the assets that we have and um, and, and use that to, to increase retail there. There’s, here’s one thing I just want to add and I know we’re running short on time. It’s your, your members want you to be successful. They want to buy products from you that, that you trust. And if as a gym you don’t talk about supplements or you don’t, if you don’t want to offer supplements, that’s fine. But talk about supplements, be a conduit for that information because when they do have questions about it or they get marketed to on Facebook or on Amazon or anything else, I can’t imagine in five years the number of people you’ve had walked through your door, Greg, after they’d been with you for two months and they’re bringing in a pile of crap that they have no business taking cause it’s not right for them where they are on their fitness journey.

Jason Rule:                             37:35                       So I highly encourage any gym that’s listening. If you’re, if you are carrying a product, offer it on day one, make it available on day one and make it part of the conversation and not something that’s just sitting on the shelf collecting dust until a member comes along and buys it from you.

Greg Strauch:                        37:51                       No, I agree. I agree. And I think, uh, that’s a perfect place to wrap it up. So thank you Jason for Bml jump on and uh, your time for sharing everything, uh, all the products that you guys have. I mean, they can always jump on the website and there’s plenty of different things that we didn’t even get into on here, but I definitely appreciate everything you guys do and uh, thank you so much for your time.

Jason Rule:                             38:11                       Oh, it was a pleasure. Greg. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 6:                               38:18                       As always, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We’d really appreciate you and everyone that has subscribed to us. If you haven’t done that, please make sure you do drop a light to that episode. Share with a friend and if you haven’t already, please write us a review and rate us on how what you think. If you hated it, let us know if you loved it, even better. See you guys later.

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Greg Strauch:                        00:02                       Welcome everyone to TwoBrain Radio! It is our mission at TwoBrain to provide 1 million entrepreneurs the freedom to live the life that they choose to join us every week as we discover the very best practices to achieve perfect day and move you closer to wealth.

Speaker 2:                               00:25                       Yeah.

Chris Cooper:                        00:26                       This episode is brought to you by Healthy Steps Nutrition. I first met Nicole over a year ago when one of my favorite crossfit affiliates introduced me to her because Nicole was helping them. Sam Brumenschenkel, of crossfit port orange started a nutrition program in her box and that conversation turned into something larger. A year later, Nicole has a fantastic bolt on nutrition program that you can add to your box anywhere in the world. So if you’re thinking, I need to start presenting better nutrition information to my clients, or I need a new revenue stream, or I want to know more about nutrition, but I don’t know where to get started. Healthy steps has that. What they’re going to do is put you or one of your coaches even better through a course, get them qualified to start teaching nutrition. Then they’re going to add you to a private Facebook group.

Chris Cooper:                        01:14                       They’re going to give you a rollout so that you can do a nutrition challenge at your gym, which more than pays for the cost of enrolling them in the course and then provide an ongoing mentorship program for your nutrition program so you can continue to run things for your clients like in nutrition accountability plan every month like we do at catalyst. Nicole is a fantastic person and after launching healthy steps nutrition online, she actually opened up her own box. She’s working with some massive clients including some big big school boards across the country now and she’s in a great position to actually change people’s lives. With nutrition. You can be a conduit for that. Your clients need nutrition advice and counseling. Healthy steps is the best possible solution to this. It’s bolt on. You can take a coach who’s passionate about nutrition and give them the help they need to start a program overseen by a registered dietician, Nicole Marshawn, how the steps. Nutrition is a proud sponsor of two brain and I am so glad to have them. Nicole will be speaking at our summit in Chicago, June 3rd and fourth this year. You do not want to miss her.

Greg Strauch:                        02:20                       Have you ever decided that you wanted to start a youth program within your gym or a crossfit kids program? As many, many gyms have done. If you’re anything like me, you were very enthusiastic to start it but didn’t realize that there’s a lot of bumps along the way. Having the right coach take on this opportunity is definitely difficult to find because not every coach is going to be able to fill that role. I know personally, I would not be good at coaching youth, not because I’m not good at coaching, but I don’t feel like I have the tools that those kids would need to be successful. Luckily, I have found a coach that is amazing at coaching youth on this episode. We talk to Gretchen. Gretchen is a youth program manager within her gym but has brought on this really awesome program to to brain and this is mentoring youth coaches and their programs that they run.

Greg Strauch:                        03:16                       We dive into not only what it’s like to start a youth program and realize that, hey, I don’t know everything. I am making mistakes and fixing those as Gretchen has done. But then we also get into what it’s like working with other youth programs, making sure that the one size fits all doesn’t really work in this model. So the content that she produces and the 10 week program she has created is generalized and then sit down and you guys talk about specifics of how it can help your program out. She also talks about some gyms that she has worked with in a pilot program for this program that within three months we’re getting their Roi on the payment of the program. So hope you guys enjoyed the episode. All right, I’m here with Gretchen Bredemeyer Meyer. She is brought on an amazing program to, to brain and that is a mentorship for youth programs. So welcome Gretchen.

Gretchen:                                04:15                       Thanks so much. Glad to be here.

Greg Strauch:                        04:16                       So let’s kind of get into a little bit of background about this and more of your background, how you got started into building youth programs, the programs that you’ve built that have kind of led you to the path of finding a need in the market for people that are running a youth program and really don’t know what to do, or a gym that would like to start, one that has a coach but really doesn’t know where to go from there. So let’s kind of get into your, a little bit about your background and where you’re from and what has led you to this point.

Gretchen:                                04:45                       Yeah, absolutely. Uh, my story about working with youth started about when I was a youth myself. I’ve always worked with camps. When I graduated from college, I became an interpreter for the deaf and hard of hearing and worked almost exclusively in the school system. So I was in a school system all year and in the summertimes I would venture off and sort of enjoy the outdoors, right? So I would, I, you know, hiking, Whitewater raft, guiding, leading trips, uh, rock climbing. So every summer brought on sort of a new adventure. And every time I sort of stepped into a new adventure, my role was always to do that thing with the youth or prepare a program for the youth to do that. So I’ve run and directed camps for rock climbing. I’ve run programs for Whitewater kayaking and you know, anything that I could do outside with kids.

Gretchen:                                05:34                       That’s what I was doing every summer since I started my career in interpreting. One year I remember, I don’t really like the cold and it was January and we are white water kayaking. And I was like, you know what man, I got to find something warmer to do in January. And my husband was like, yeah, I checked out crossfit one time. You want to try it? So, uh, the story just continues right as I got into crossfit, my thing became, you know, find a way to get the involved, find a way to make this awesome for young people. Um, because, uh, the one thing that’s different between all of the adventures that I had gone on before and crossfit is that it is valuable to use for the rest of their lives. Like you’re not just changing their day or their month or one simple paradigm.

Gretchen:                                06:13                       You’re changing their lives. And so it became really apparent to me quite early on that it was important to make this as accessible and is it successful for youth as I possibly could. And so that’s what I endeavored to do and we’ve made some headway. Some headway though. The start was sort of rough. I love that you said how I found the need in the market was that, uh, when I first started my, the owner of the gym, his name is Josh, was doing mentor calls with his own mentor. He’s the one that decided I was an intrepreneur and should really start and run this program. I thought he was crazy, but he finally convinced me to do it and I thought, Hey, those mentor calls sound like a great idea. Can somebody do one of those for me with this youth program I’m trying to run now and I looked and looked and crickets, man, there is nobody out there doing it. So I thought, you know, I’m going to make this successful for kids, not just for my program, but I’m going to endeavor to do it for everybody’s program just like I have with everything else that I’ve done.

Greg Strauch:                        07:06                       And that’s, I mean, and I completely could see the need for this, especially within my own gym. Having a coach who runs an awesome program, but there’s things that you’ve made mistakes with that other people can learn from. I think Chris has brought that up many, many, many times on this podcast about the mistakes that he’s made has allowed others to benefit from those mistakes and not have to make the same ones, which only allows the trajectory of the business to 10 x basically so that you don’t have to worry about those, those potholes. So you started the youth program at the gym and started building it, but realized, hey, I would like to have some kind of mentorship, somebody to help me along this path of the program I’m building within the gym. But there really wasn’t anything. So you decided to take it upon yourself to create this awesome program now?

Gretchen:                                07:58                       Yeah, it was crazy. I think I’ve made all the mistakes. If you, if you want to talk about a mistake, I’ve probably been there. Um, so it was just, you know, there wasn’t anybody to help me out. So it was trial and error. It was, you know, should we do sessions? Should we do membership? Should we do six week sessions? How long should we do sections? How do you charge for sessions? How many kids did you have in your class? What age groups do you need to figure out? How do you mark it, what the interactions with parents needs to look like? How does hiring in new youth coach and to look like, what does this four nights thing and how does it apply to this program and so on and so forth. And so it was just a long process of tests, experiment, try it out, see what’s good and fairly, fairly soon down the road I’d say like maybe here after I started, as I got to know to brain a little bit better, I got onto their page and started really questioning other gyms about what was working for them.

Gretchen:                                08:49                       So because I knew that the longterm goal was sort of endeavoring to help other programs succeed as well. Uh, I tried to make an effort to sort of not only gather data from my gym but from other gyms as well, which was very helpful. Um, and it’s what eventually led me into sort of mentoring a few gyms. So it, you know, as you make those steps, just like Chris said, as you make those steps and you figure out what’s, what, what doesn’t work, it propels you into what does work and the things that really do work are what you can share and you can, you can help people figure out faster. Right. It took me like a solid, a solid two, if not two and a half years to get things running well with processes in place that I could count on that made it really, that made it so that I can actually focus all of my time and Energy on great coaching, great programming, great events. And that’s where you really want to be, right? That’s what your kids deserve. They need to have your full attention and your programming in your coaching, in the events that you run in the way that you interact with them. They deserve all that. So, um, I guess my desire was just to be able to hand somebody a fully functioning program and say, hey, you’re an amazing coach. Go do that thing without distractions and these kids are going to succeed as a result.

Greg Strauch:                        09:55                       And that’s awesome. And that’s, that’s what makes you such a, I think we’ve, we’ve coined the term intrepreneur, but really an entrepreneur, I mean that’s what you’re doing. You’re building a business within a business. And then on top of that now creating an avenue for those gyms that have decided, hey, I would like to start a youth program. So now that you’re, you’ve kind of moved to that seed of mentoring other, other gyms and other businesses to develop these programs. What have you said like, Hey, these are the right people for these programs. If there’s a gym out there that’s listening that says, Hey, I want to start this program, but I don’t know if someone in my staff could possibly take this on. What are those attributes that you’ve seen that really say, hey, this is the kind of person that you want to start this program?

Gretchen:                                10:43                       Yeah. Whether or not you have that person is, is definitely the linchpin. And I would tell gyms don’t think that because you don’t have that person, you can’t create that person. In my story, I did not think that I was any sort of entrepreneur at all. Um, and it took a lot of mentorship from Josh, the owner of the gym, to really spark that in me, to really ignite that vision and, and free me to sort of run after it. And so first of all, I’d say if you can find the attributes of an entrepreneur, the same attributes that allow you to be really successful with your gym, right? Because a youth program is just like an intrepreneur is just an entrepreneur on us, like a smaller scale, right? With us with an umbrella, right? It’s the, it’s the entrepreneurs that would love to be entrepreneurs but really need a little bit of a safety net, you know, that’s who we are.

Gretchen:                                11:28                       So if you can, if you can find somebody who sort of has the same attributes that really make you a successful business owner, then that’s sort of who you’re looking for. Not, not that you need a reflection of yourself, but somebody that’s passionate, somebody that’s willing to work hard, so many that is, that is motivated by, this is the success of others. Um, I would say is a big one. I talked to Chris a little bit the other day and I said, I dunno, you know, the Enneagram, I’m a number six, which is a helper. Maybe, maybe that’s a good place to start, but you see these people in lots of different areas, right? And so as you look around your gym, I would really almost most challenging to find somebody that you think has these attributes and sort of start the process of pouring into them and talking to them about what really motivates them and what their perfect day looks like and what they’re passionate about.

Gretchen:                                12:13                       Because I bet you have one in your gym or somebody that you know closely. Right. A lot of the people that end up working for gyms are a retired pastors working really well in one of them. There’s a mom of kids who are older and they don’t, they don’t have to spend as much as their of their evening time really pouring into their own kids. They’re in college now, so they have some extra time, but they love kids and they love pouring into kids. So you know, that really works. Teachers are a hard sell, right? Teachers are great with kids. They do amazing stuff, but they’re overworked and underpaid and usually work far into the evenings trying to do their jobs so they don’t really have the time or really they just don’t have the energy to pour it in kids any longer by the end of the day.

Gretchen:                                12:54                       So it’s a good try, right? If you find the perfect person, awesome. But I would say don’t just assume that because somebody has a teacher, they’re going to be the perfect fit for your gym or for your program. I would also say, you know, young coaches that are really looking to get a four nights program under their belt, you see that they have business skills, you see that they’re hardworking, they’re motivated, they really want to get it done. Somebody who just needs the hours and needs to, you know, figure out where their place in this crossfit world is. That’s another good place to start. But, um, my challenge to you guys, to the gym owners out there listening would be that I bet there’s somebody in your gym like that. And with just a touch of inspiration and the beginnings of mentorship for them. I bet you can ignite that spirit in them.

Greg Strauch:                        13:32                       Perfect. I think you mentioned it earlier, but we actually have a stay at home mom that loves crossfit. Used to actually coach kids skiing and snowboarding back in the day and she just loves working with kids and started other programs in other crossfit gyms, so as soon as she came through the door and how enthusiastic she is, I was like, she’s perfect for starting this program within our, with our gym.

Gretchen:                                13:58                       Yeah, there’s that. There’s a swim coach. What am I, one of my favorite coaches that she’s amazing with the kids as as a swim coach. Right. You can get coaches of other things as long as they have the time. Right. That’s the big one.

Greg Strauch:                        14:09                       That’s a big thing. If somebody has a right fit for this program. Let’s kind of talk about the overview of what the program kind of brings to the table for those coaches that are, are either starting or have started a kids program or youth program and then kind of how this program builds on top of that.

Gretchen:                                14:27                       Yeah. The program that I’ve created, it’s a mentorship program is sort of, uh, just my way of, of sort of coming alongside walking alongside somebody in order to sort of get them to their most efficient, their most profitable and the most successful for the kids program that they can get to. And a short amount of time, right? So what I offer is, is 10 weeks of online videos, written content and action items that a program manager, once you find that perfect person would come and learn, uh, online. And then once they finish all the action items, they would have a half an hour phone call with me. We’re in, we’ll sort of customized everything that they’ve learned for their specific gym and for their specific way of coaching and their style, sort of doing things. So we went to sort of, my goal is to sort of completely wrap around your coach, right?

Gretchen:                                15:18                       It’s, it’s something that honestly, any gym owner that really loves mentorship and loves, like relationship could do. It’s just a matter of do you have the time and the knowledge and the best practices to do it. So it’s not necessarily something that’s completely unique to me. I just have a passion for it and I have the time for it and making the time for it. And I just, I just love to do it. Right. I love to see people blossom. I love to see people be as, as efficient and productive and profitable as it can be. Because as much as I’m not a gym, no gym owner, I understand that the success of the gym overall and the success of the youth program are tightly interwoven. And the success of both of those things is really required to impact the kids that I’m so passionate about impacting.

Gretchen:                                16:02                       Right? So you can’t have one without the other two. And so, you know, when I went to my crossfit kids cert, they said, you know, this isn’t it. It’s really just not going to be profitable. You have to do it cause it’s the right thing to do and I thought to myself, man, youth programs just aren’t always going to last in every gym for very long. If that’s the case, like not everybody has the capacity to do that. How can I sort of not prove them wrong but find a different paradigm to work under so that this can be really profitable so these kids can really succeed and have access to just an incredible thing and incredible value that we know is crossfit and so that’s the plane of the mentorship, right? We go through a ton of topics. We talk about all the, the the like the shotgun topics, the easy ones, right?

Gretchen:                                16:43                       We talk about the age groups, we talk about the format of your classes. It’s actually really important which age group goes first in which age group goes second in your like schedule of the day. We talk about which one to start up and how many to start up at the same time and what to do when one of those is easier than the other. We also talk about your coaching style and how that sort of affects all of these things. We go through your perfect day. We, we find goals for you. I have this great system that I’ve found for just organization of your life in general that makes, uh, the typical program manager who’s sort of on survival mode and living like week to week, find the capacity to plan out a month, three months in a year in advance for the benefit of their program and their kids and their gym. So we do a lot, we work over like, you know, the entirety of the next what, 1215 months of your life. So it’s a, it’s a 10 week program, but the scope of it is pretty broad. So by the end of that 10 weeks, you should walk away pretty confident in what your next year’s gonna look like and, and really confident in the fact that you are doing the best thing that you can do for your kids and, and the, the longevity of your program in that gym for sure.

Greg Strauch:                        17:48                       Wow. 10, I mean, 10 full weeks of, of knowledge. And basically getting that, that general understanding so that you can turn around and talk to you about the specifics of how can I tailor this to my gym is, is amazing. I mean that’s, that’s a huge amount. And I remember I was talking before about this, but the marketing side of this, because I know like personally for us, uh, it’s very hard for us to market our kids program, our youth program more of because we just don’t know where to start. So what kind of marketing skills or marketing tools have you brought to the table to bring on a youth program and sustain it long term with getting more people through the door to jump into those programs?

Gretchen:                                18:29                       Specific to the program and the things that we talk about in my mentorship, the truth of the matter is, is that word of mouth is still just huge with kids programs, right? Through the mentorship, we talk a lot about how to get kids talking about your program at the bus stop and how to get moms talking about your program when they have coffee with other moms. We talk about the importance of car magnets and tee shirts, and it all sounds so dinosaur era, right? That’s not how marketing goes right now, but for whatever reason, you know, when there’s something as valuable as a child involved, parents really only trust what other people that they trust say about it. And so that word of mouth is still, for whatever reason, huge, huge in youth programming. Right? Um, and so we sort of talk about marketing through relationship.

Gretchen:                                19:17                       And you know, Chris has some great ideas on this. He, he writes level at or is he does, there’s all sorts of things that he’s already sort of brought together as far as how relationship and marketing are so tightly interwoven. And so in my mentorship I talk about there’s definitely things that you can, that you can do, right? Like a, it’s never a bad idea to seek out a photographer rate. Hobby photographers are literally everywhere. And the difference and the difference between my pictures and your General Hobby photographers pictures are night and day and, and they love to do it. And, and you have an a huge, a huge room filled with adorable children that they are going to be sites to take pictures of. Right? So we have a hobby photographer and Arjun that comes to our competitions. He comes to our big events and his pictures are literally invaluable.

Gretchen:                                20:10                       I have no idea what I would pay for pay him if he asked for payment. But they’re absolutely invaluable to my program. It’s sort of what my program stands on. And so things like that, right? There’s lots of little things you can do, but that’s, that’s one idea that it’s never a bad idea to approach somebody and just ask them if they can walk alongside your program. If, especially if they’re a crossfitter. Right. They see the value of crossfit and it’s not a long step to show them that if they had started crossfit though, when, when they were six, then they wouldn’t be having problems with their knees and their hips. They wouldn’t be having the issues that they’re having right now. And it doesn’t, it’s not that hard to inspire somebody that way. You know what I mean? And I like as a youth program manager, that’s one other attribute that’s really, really important is that you really need to be able to like tell the story of your kids, tell the story of your whole, your kids, their whole lives and, and, and the impacts that you have and the value that you bring to sort of just inspire, uh, excitement and the people around you and around your program.

Gretchen:                                21:07                       There’s lots of people who support my program in little ways, right? There’s lots of people who will call me and say, Hey, I just found mats. This gymnastics place was going out of business and I just dumpster dove for you. Awesome. I love that. You know, that this program is valuable enough to go grab those mats before anybody else does. Or, you know, I have parents that are like, Hey, I’d really love to, you know, my daughter and I were making Christmas cards that are crossfit themed. It’s a little t-rex pulling a sled with a Santa hat on and we want to sell the cards are like at least ask people to donate and we just want to give them money to your program, right? So at least at least 90% of your job is helping people understand the value of your program and people are generous people or get excited about kids doing really cool things. And so you can really, um, with, with some effort, right? You have to be intentional, but you can really get people on board and, and, and that’s the best place. That’s the best environment you could possibly hope for for these kids, for your program and for profitability for your gym. Right. That’s like the perfect little place to be.

Greg Strauch:                        22:10                       Agreed. And I, it’s funny you mentioned reaching out or, or better yet, people reach out to you to help you with growing the program because you’ve, you’ve kind of installed that, hey, this is what the value of this program is. And I mean long term. I mean if we could get those kids to go to more of a like a junior varsity or as they get older to a varsity and then eventually into regular class, that would be an amazing goal to really get them into always being healthy and understanding exercise and moving properly and really living longer hours is the end goal. Right, but it’s funny that you mentioned people reaching out to you because I remember when I first started our program, we had a two members that are business owners in town and I remember I really wanted to build this program.

Greg Strauch:                        22:53                       They had their son in it and we just weren’t getting a whole lot of traction on it. We only had maybe a handful to eight kids in the program and it just wasn’t, I priced the programming correctly. I did all the mistakes that I know if I would have had with program that you had available, it would have definitely changed all of that. But I remember being like, man, I wish I could get more equipment for this. And I remember when the business owners reached out to me and said, hey, it’s the end of the year, we would like to get more of a tax break. You know, understand this as a business to business. We would love to buy equipment for the kids program. And I remember when they first offered this, I said, no, no, no, no. I mean having the whole ego and pride. Right. And I remember going back and Danny was his name, he, he just, he’s in a phenomenal person and I love him and his wife, but he was relentless.

Greg Strauch:                        23:45                       This, I mean, he’s like, it’s getting closer. I got to, I got to buy equipment. What do you need? And I remember going to my coach that was wearing the program at the time. I said, hey, what equipment would you need? Like make a dream sheet. And so she did. And it was, I looked at it and I said, wow, this is, this is pretty expensive. This is not cheap. And Danny, Danny came to me again and was like, Hey, do you have a list? Do you have something? I said, yeah, this is it. This is a what my coach made. So if you just want to pick one or two items, that’s fine. And I remember getting the shipment in and he bought everything and I couldn’t believe it. And I was like bought us those, the maths, the gymnastics mats and some of the little, uh, I think they’re called Oso barbells will hit barbells and really just helped us kind of build that program, which was amazing.

Greg Strauch:                        24:27                       So anybody that is listening that is building a program currently, of course I’m going to say, hey, let’s, let’s make sure that you jump on a call with Gretchen and we’ll talk about that and make sure it’s in the show notes for the link. But really don’t forget to use that affinity marketing and reaching out to your members that have kids possibly in the program or if you’re starting a program to kind of help help you facilitate the, the equipment needs and, and maybe there’s a certification or something like that because I know they’d be happy to do it. And if it’s coming from a business, they can write that off in their taxes. So, you know, uh, they will be all about that at the end of the year.

Gretchen:                                25:00                       Yeah. And to say like not only is it beneficial for their business, but a lot of my background was actually in mission work. I was raised in faith and love to do mission work and I just remember writing to people and being like, I don’t want to ask people for money to send me to this awesome place that I’m going to be excited about. And I remember people saying over and over again, right, they can’t go to this place. They can’t do this thing. And so what you’re doing is you’re sharing this awesome opportunity with somebody else and letting them get involved in something that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. Right. And if you truly believe that your program is a value rate, if you truly believe that what you have to offer is the best thing out there for these kids, then it’s going to do nothing but provide value and a sense of, of, of worth and being involved in something greater than yourself. If you allow other people to get involved to help you to offer those opportunities without equipment or whatever the case may be. Right. It’s not only helpful for your program, it’s helpful for that person, which is sort of a backwards or like hard to accept paradigm I guess.

Greg Strauch:                        26:02                       It is. It definitely is. Um, but like I think that underlying tone of of exactly what we’re both saying and you’ve really hit on it, but it’s, it’s really that mindset, like changing the mindset of, of thinking that you’re, you’re sticking your hand out for, for handouts. But really you’re, you’re trying to get this program off the ground and you have to understand the value that you’re providing, which is huge. I mean, if you could, if we think about this from a macro standpoint and if this kid could go through a program and at the end of their life live and extra 10, 20 even years because they’ve been in a program like this their entire life and they saw the value in what it would do for them long term. I mean that’s huge. Yeah. I mean, you’re extending people’s lives and quality

Gretchen:                                26:46                       life too, right? You’re not going to end up in all those places where we see our grandparents and our parents these days, like that’s not where these kids are going to end up.

Greg Strauch:                        26:55                       So if somebody’s okay, hey, you know what, they’re listening to this. They want to sign up for this program. They feel like everything that you, you talked about or that we’ve talked about so far, what exactly is the process for them to get started?

Gretchen:                                27:09                       Yeah, so, um, first of all, I think that in order to get excited about this program, um, you have to know that my goal is to help youth programs, right? My goal is to help gyms. And so before I offer it this youth program, I think it’s helpful to say I did it on my own without to rain for about a year and a half. And then once I came to to brain, I did a pilot, right? I wanted to and and to brain wanted to make sure that the value of this mentorship program was going to be something that was going to be a helpful advantageous to gym owners. Right? So we tested the Roi, right? We looked at what the value was and I took specific notes on what that Roi look like. And before you jump in or like are emotionally led to have like these adorable kids doing really well and your gym, which will happen, it’ll be fantastic.

Gretchen:                                28:00                       But I want you also to know that, like, I honestly interested in partnering with your gym in a way that’s going to be beneficial to you. So I can tell you that the gyms that I’ve worked with now have absolutely within three months of the mentorship, gotten a return on investment. They’ve gotten that back. They’ve seen a difference in how their gym, uh, brings in revenue. Right? And so before I tell you like, hey, sign up. I just want to give you a couple of examples of the fact that like this works, it really works and it doesn’t work necessarily because I’m great, but because I’ve spent the time figuring out what it is that it works, right. There’s a program that I worked with just recently and at the end of the mentorship there last month during the mentorship, their revenue for the youth program was whole 42.

Gretchen:                                28:45                       The following month I revenue was 1438. The following month their revenue is 2170. And the following month was was July. Now July is when we plan all of our camps, right? And so the revenue for July was 39, 17. Right? You’re not going to get July months all year round. But it’s, it’s good to note that in, you know, 10 weeks plus a couple months there, they were doing a great job of really applying all the concepts that I, that I give them and that I did it, that they really used. And worked with and really grew, right? We, you know, it’s not going to happen in that three months because the thing with kids is that kids programs are cyclical, right? They’ve got definite up, up months and down months. And I was talking with Chris, he says that during the hockey season, everybody leads. Um, so if you’re in Canada, what I would do is I’d work with you on what you can do during hockey season.

Gretchen:                                29:36                       But my goal is to really create a program with, uh, with dependable revenue, right? You don’t want huge ups and huge down. So how do we avoid that? How do we make sure that you’re getting a more dependable revenue stream and ultimately a continuously growing revenue stream out of your youth program? So that’s one of the things that we work really hard to do. And I really endeavored toward making this worth its value, right? So that said, right, I would love to talk to anybody, right? Send your, send your program managers my way. You as an owner book a book, an intro call with me. I would love to chat with you, see where you are, right? There are some gyms that just aren’t in a great place to start this program. And if that’s the case, I will tell you, right, these are a couple of things that need to happen before this mentorship is actually going to be super valuable to you.

Gretchen:                                30:22                       Right? Or call me and maybe I’ll be like, oh my goodness, this is, it can be so good for you. I can’t wait. That’ll be exciting. We’ll get everything done right. Um, I get so excited to work with people, but have him call me. Right? We can discuss all of your like superficial layer problems. I am so happy to help with that. And then, and then we can talk about what that, what that 10 week mentorship looks like. Right? Because if I can, if I can communicate with you and figure out what you need, then I can best communicate what I can bring to the table. What, what it really looks like to do that. So we have links. I’m sure that Greg is going to put him as he said in the, yeah, so there’s links, but there should be a link for an intro call with me.

Gretchen:                                31:01                       You can reach me@gretchenattwobrainbusiness.com. I have an Instagram page, it’s under coach to kids. See, oh, a c h the number two and the word kid. All one word. Um, that’s my Instagram where you can see lots of fun pictures about what I do with my program. You use it as a tool for helping your program and, and I would just love to chat with you, right? The more people that I can help, the more people that I can learn from, the more data we can collect. This process only gets more streamlined, right? And at this point in time, we already have processes and SAP that we can just hand you, right? So what, as we continue to grow, we’re only going to be more and more beneficial. There’s also an online community called to brain kids that’s currently open. Um, we are going to have to close that group to a mentorship clients sometimes soon. I think if towards the end of January. But for right now it’s open. So come on, join that group, ask any questions that you have. Um, I would love to chat with you their answer questions. They’re sort of see what best way I can sort of fill the gap for where your program is right now.

Greg Strauch:                        32:01                       Awesome. Gretchen, thank you for your time and being able to jump on the podcast and sharing this amazing program. I mean I’m about to jump on the links as soon as, as soon as I make sure I get them in the show notes, but I am going to definitely be jumping on a call so that I can get my kids or my youth coach basically on board with this because I would love to expand on the programs that we have to offer, uh, on top of what we already have. So thank you so much for the time and we greatly appreciate it.

Gretchen:                                32:27                       Awesome. Thank you so much, Greg. Have a great day.

Greg Strauch:                        32:35                       As always. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We greatly appreciate

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