All of us are surrounded by a million great ideas. How do you know which to do, and which to wait on? The biggest job we have as mentors is to help you filter these ideas, take action on them and execute them until they are done. Today we talk about the process to do this and how we recommend you do it at Two Brain!
Be on the lookout for my new book coming out in just a few weeks: Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief!
Don’t Forget about the 2019 Two Brain Summit, June 8-9 in Chicago! This year we have some amazing topics and guests for both yourself and your coaches. Click here to register and sign up now!
Links:
https://www.amazon.com/Anything-You-Want-Lessons-Entrepreneur/dp/1511366079
Timeline:
2:34 – Introduction to Building a Measuring Stick
3:48 – How does Two Brain grow from user input?
5:35 – You can do anything but you can’t do everything
7:53 – The importance of the roles and tasks exercise
12:02 – The best way to approach new ideas in your business
15:55 – Overloading your business with too much software
18:00 – The hierarchy of questions to ask yourself when choosing between ideas
23:06 – Testing your idea for an appropriate amount of time
29:30 – Some examples of important metrics within your affiliate
Announcer: 00:02 Welcome everyone to Two-Brain Radio. It is our mission at Two-Brain to provide 1 million entrepreneurs the freedom to live the life that they choose. Join us every week as we discover the very best practices to achieve perfect day and move you closer to wealth.
Chris Cooper: 00:26 Everyone. Chris Cooper here and really thrilled to see you this year in June in Chicago at the 2019 Two-Brain summit. Every year we have two separate speaking tracks is one for you, the business owner, and there’s one for coaches that will help them make better, longer, more meaningful careers under the umbrella of your business. This year we’ve got some pretty amazing topics like: the client success manager, how to change your life organizational culture or the business owner’s life cycle, how to have breaks, how to have vacations, how to help your marriage survive. Owning a business and motivation and leadership. How to convert more clients, how to create a GM position that runs your gym for you and leaves you free to grow your business. How to start a business owner’s group in your community in more point here is to do the right thing that will help gym owners create better businesses that will last them for the long term, get them to tinker phase, help them be more successful, create meaningful careers that their coaches and give their clients a meaningful path to longterm health.
Chris Cooper: 01:26 We only do one big seminar every year and that’s the Two-Brain Summit. The reason that we do that is because a big part of the benefit is getting the Two-Brain community together and welcoming strangers into our midst and showing them how amazing gym ownership really can be. We’ll have a link to the Two-Brain summit, including a full list of all speakers and topics on both the owners and the coaches side in the show notes. I really hope to see you there.
Chris Cooper: 01:49 Today we’re going to talk about how to build a measuring stick. All of us are surrounded by a million great ideas, right? And a lot of the times these are actually good ideas and we just find that we can’t do everything. And so we have to deal with as entrepreneurs with things now like overwhelm and paralysis by analysis, you know, things that entrepreneurs 30 years ago didn’t really have to deal with.
Chris Cooper: 02:12 They followed traditional routes. They opened up their business, they put up a good sign, they called the yellow pages, they maybe ran a newspaper ad or sponsored a kid’s baseball team. But now there are a lot of opportunities available to us. And our biggest job as mentors is to help you filter those ideas, take action on them and stay focused on them until they’re done and then build on them. So today we’re going to talk about the process for doing that. How we actually do it at Two-Brain because we get nailed with good ideas, you know, two to three times every single week and how we make sure that we’re only doing one thing at a time to measure the effect before we release it to you guys. So, um, first there are a couple of key points that we’re going to start off with here.
Chris Cooper: 02:53 And the first is that we’ve been talking a lot recently about how Two-Brain grows from input. So the original Two-Brain modules, all the original templates, all the original knowledge came from catalyst. It was all like my journey and my failings and my learnings. And then as we added to the mentoring team, we were able to diversify and broaden that knowledge base. So you know, Danielle’s staff handbook was better than mine and now Kaleda’s staff handbook is the best in the universe. And so that’s the one that we give you guys. And Brian Strump was offering the best hybrid memberships in the world. That became the gold standard. And so that’s what we teach now is his model. And it’s been interesting to watch the progress of catalyst as Jamie and Miranda update catalyst to all of these best practices in the world.
Chris Cooper: 03:39 You know, what we mentor and teach at TwoBrain really is like the culmination of the best of all of us in the best that’s out there. And most of my job is exploring these new ideas and opportunities, figuring out what is actually going to work. And then helping, you know, put that into our curriculum. But the problem is that I’m kind of an idea guy myself and I’m an easily distracted guy myself and I get attracted to great ideas and shiny bright spots on the side of the road, probably more than anybody else. So when it comes to overwhelming the system and pumping these new ideas in, and I say we get two to
three a week and we can’t do everything, you know, I’m probably the biggest culprit there. I’m the one that feeds two ideas into the system every week. And when you’re surrounded by genius, active people who are going to take something and run, that’s actually a problem because there’s no shortage of great ideas, but there isn’t a shortage of brain space and energy and time.
Chris Cooper: 04:36 So today I want to talk about how to figure out which ones you use right now. The first thing I want to do is recommend a book called “anything you want” by Derek Sivers. I’ve read this book three times. It gets better every time. And the key point to take away from his book is that you can do anything but you can’t do everything. And so the key, when you have a great idea and it doesn’t fit into our annual plan and it’s like you’re adding one more thing to your plate, he is to tell yourself, I’m gonna write this idea down and I’m going to do it at the end of the year or two quarters from now, six months, whatever. And you come back to it in six months and you say, is this one of my top three priorities now? And it was a real step by step process that I’m going to give you in a few minutes that will help you to determine like when the idea is so big that you really should replace some of your priorities with it or when you should maybe just leave it on the back burner.
Chris Cooper: 05:26 Okay. So first, what IS overwhelm? Overwhelm is just basically this paralyzing feeling that you have too many things that you can do. And so you wind up doing none of them. Or maybe you know, there are two or three things that you could be doing right now, but none of them are as easy as going in the Facebook group and looking to see what everybody else is doing or just reading their bright spots. Overwhelm is when you have so many things to do that you wind up doing none of them. And it’s a really common phenomenon because our brains are wired to avoid this kind of stress. When we have decisions to make, we try to procrastinate. It’s a natural human tendency when we have choice to make, we tend to defer. We don’t like making choices. We don’t like being committed to this one thing because what if it goes wrong?
Chris Cooper: 06:12 And the old analogy of, if you want to starve a mule, what you do is you, you put them 10 feet away from the water trough on this side and 10 feet away from the haystack on this side and you try to let them decide whether they’re more hungry or thirsty and eventually they die of thirst and starvation at the same time because they can’t just choose one. That’s what overwhelm means. And really that’s what the new book Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief is about: what advice you should take and what actions you should be focused on depending on what phase you’re in, in your entrepreneurial journey. All right, but I want to talk about today is what happens when you see a fantastic idea and it wasn’t in your plans and you’re already pretty busy and you don’t know how you can fit it in, but you get a start anyway.
Chris Cooper: 06:52 You know, you start piling things on. All right? So let’s walk through what an actual plan is. So first of all, I’ve got a couple of criteria for helping you decide. All things being equal, let’s assume that you have time to work on one big idea and you’re deciding between two or three really good things. You know, what am I going to work on today? I’ve just found myself three hours. I don’t have to coach the morning classes. I’m in the gym, I’m by myself. My mentor told me two or three things. I’m a month behind on my calls. Which one of these am I going to do? The real reason that we teach the roles and tasks exercise in the incubator first is roles and tasks is a tool. It’s a model for thinking things through one tiny step at a time. It’s practice for breaking an activity down into its lowest irreducible common denominator.
Chris Cooper: 07:43 Okay? It’s getting into the dirt of the dirt of cleaning, whatever. And the real reason that we want you to do that, number one, it’s going to let you get those things off your plate. But number two is because I want to train you to think of what comes before. What I want you to, to think about things in a logical order. When we learned to leverage our time best, we learn to ask the question what comes before that? So in the incubator program, just as an example here, we do roles and tasks because that allows you to free up your time a little bit to work on the next thing, which is a staff playbook. And the staff playbook frees you to work on the next thing, which is setting up a retention system. And once you’ve got a retention system built, then it makes sense to build a sales system because you’ve got a sticky net for the sales that you make and once you’ve been trained on sales and you’re good at having no sweat intros and conversations and goal reviews, then it makes sense to teach you outward bound sales, which is affinity marketing and when you’re good at having conversations and saying, how can I serve you?
Chris Cooper: 08:45 How can I help? Then it makes sense to teach you how to do it digitally. How does scale using Facebook marketing? The reason that we do it in that order is each step multiplies the effects of the steps after it. These are not like additional topics; they’re. multipliers. They’re levers. Okay, so in the fitness industry, to make a similar analogy, think about what happens when somebody starts working out at the gym. They sign up and they get two months in and they’re starting to look at like muscle and fitness magazines on the store shelves or, or they’re asking people who kick around the gym like, Hey, what’s your workout? What are you doing? And eventually the topic of supplements comes up, right? And so the big guy at the gym will say, Oh, I have this supplement stack. I take protein and creatine and BCAAs and fish oil and whatever.
Chris Cooper: 09:32 And they give you this laundry list of all the supplements that they’re taking. And so the client turns to you and says, hey coach, should I be taking all these supplements? The answer is really, it depends, you know, as a coach to the answer to every question is, it depends.
But eventually you’re going to tell the client test, test it, see how it works. And if you’re running a controlled test, you’re going to try one thing for one month, two months, three months, and then you’re going to report back so that you’re testing things in isolation in a vacuum. Okay, so you’re this three months, we’re going to try whey protein and we’re going to see how that works. And then we’re going to, then we’re going to test creatine after that and we’re gonna see how that works. But we’re not going to test them together because if you get some kind of positive response, we won’t know which one.
Chris Cooper: 10:18 And this is how supplement sales are made and stacks are formed and like products are combined. And you guys know this stuff, right? They’re combined out of confusion. You don’t know what’s working out of the five things that you’re doing, so you’re scared to stop doing any of them. We don’t want to do that in our business because we have more than enough things to do and activity compounds, right? We get busier and busier and busier, but our progress can slow down and that’s just because we’ve got so many balls in the air we never want to drop any of. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you guys a process because I’m sure you’re getting great examples from your team, right? Like they’re coming up with great ideas. Why don’t we run a kids program? Why don’t we running like an intramural open four times a year?
Chris Cooper: 10:59 Why aren’t we running like Olympic weightlifting Tuesday and Thursday nights? All right? Now you’re leaders, your managers, which means you’re managing their emotions and not just like tactics. So you can’t just say, no, that’s a dumb idea. Here’s why we don’t do it. You can’t say, Oh yeah, no, we tried that. Here’s why it’s not going to work. What you have to do is let them know that they’re being heard, but also not commit to doing too many things. You have to be able to test one thing at a time. You have to be able to track its effects. So the very first step we’re going to take is have them put their idea into writing. All right, so we’re going to start by separating the best ideas was something that we call project proposal template.
Chris Cooper: 11:43 Having it in writing means that they have to think it through. It’s very easy for us, you and me and our staff, so become emotionally attached to an idea without thinking through all of the steps. For example, let’s say that your coach says, I want to build an American Ninja warrior course because everybody sees that show 2 million people every week. Tune in to that show and kids like to do it. So we’re going to start an American Ninja Warrior course and uh, it’s going to cost us about 8,000 bucks to set up the basics. It’s going to take a weekend of our life to build them and put them together. Uh, we’re going to have to take out a little bit more insurance to cover the, the policy. And now we’ve got this course up. And what happens? Well, traffic is driving by. They’re seeing it. Okay, yeah.
Chris Cooper: 12:27 Uh, who’s going to coach this thing? Well let’s, let’s run it on the weekends. Let’s open it up. You know, so now you’re staffing it and you’re before long taking up a lot of time, but you know, you, you really didn’t think of a revenue model behind it or how you’re really going to benefit from this. So the first thing we want to do is have your staff fill out a project proposal template. But what it does is it makes the staff think through what is the revenue model that supports this idea. All else being equal. We have five different ways that we can help our gym family this month we’re going to do the one that adds measurable value to the business. Measurable value is defined as how much profit are we going to make, how much income is this going to add to the coaches paycheck.
Chris Cooper: 13:11 And finally we’ll the value that our clients get from this exceed what they’re willing to pay for it after the coach has thought that through, they might be willing to take the next step, which is who is going to be responsible for the fulfillment and evaluation of this product. And if they’re not willing to do it, if they’re just saying like, Hey Chris, you know, we should buy five more rowers because that’ll make the open events a lot easier. Now they have to say like how they’re going to objectively measure success and are they willing to be the point person for this or are they so passionate about this program that they’re willing to take on the time risk for running it and putting it together? And that’s key. So one of the big potential pitfalls and a coach starts at four ninths model is that their programs that they’re not entrepreneurial, right?
Chris Cooper: 13:58 They don’t completely understand that their job is to run the program from scratch. If your gym has never run a kids program before, the coach might project like, oh, this is going to be easy. We’re going to, you know, open up a payment option in Zen planner, we’re going to buy some foam mats, we’re going to roll this out. People will sign up and I’m going to get paid. They don’t actually understand like all the work that they’re going to have to do to get that thing going the first time. You’re going to have to show them that, but having a written project proposal will help them think through that in advance and ask the the most important question, which is am I willing to do the work to get it there? All right. Finally, the big question that you have to ask on a project proposal is, is this important enough to replace what we currently have planned?
Chris Cooper: 14:41 How will this bump something else off the schedule? So there was a great question today. Somebody in this group just added uplaunch and they really like it, but now they’re up to five different pieces of software. They’re using Google drive, they’re using zen planner, they’re using something else, you know, maybe it is, it was acuity and they said like what is the limit to the stack here? It’s not my job to be a software operator for the rest of my life. We keep adding software and does not just add layers of complexity. And it was a great question and we used to ha
ve this rule a Two-Brain that if you are going to bring in a new piece of software then you had to tell us which piece of software that we’re currently using that we’re going to take off the board. And that’s why we weren’t adopting, you know, like five different process management things all at once.
Chris Cooper: 15:30 And that’s why it took us six months to come up with a CRM that we really liked because it had to replace something else. So when you’re thinking about a new project, a new idea, what you need to think about is like what current thing am I working on that this is going to replace? Never think I’m going to add this onto my plate. Your plate is already full enough. All right? Then what we want to do is we want to hold up our templates in the staff meeting and you know, so we’ve got these monthly staff meetings going and you say, okay guys, we got project proposals for these three ideas, let’s discuss them. So the first thing is what current program are we willing to sacrifice to bring this in? Like we’re not going to add it, we’re going to replace something else.
Chris Cooper: 16:13 Second, how will we objectively assess success in this program? How will we measure that? And then how will this benefit our clients? How will this benefit you, the coaches, how will this benefit the business? Okay? And it’s really important to let your coaches try to answer those questions too, so they understand like, here is what’s actually important. All right? After you’ve done that and you familiarize your coaches with all of your ideas and you’re still having trouble deciding which one to do. Here’s the hierarchy of questions that you have to answer. Number one, what’s the right thing to do for the majority of my clients, so if you’re thinking, well, we could run a an Olympic weightlifting program where we could run a crossfit kids program, but like we’d have to charge twice as much for CrossFit kids and we could only get like six kids in the group and I’m not sure our clients are going to pay for that.
Chris Cooper: 17:01 The question to answer is what does the right thing to do for the majority of my clients? If the majority of your clients have kids who would benefit from the crossfit kids program, then that’s the best thing to do. If the majority of your clients are 23 years old and they love Olympic weightlifting, then that’s the right thing to do. Okay, so the first question you need to answer is what’s the right thing to do for the majority of my clients? The second question is, what is the right thing to do for the majority of my coaches? So let’s say that your listening to one coach asks you for a proposed program or a schedule change. Okay. And you have to understand that like you can’t respond to just squeaky wheels all the time. So you have to say like, is this the best thing to do for the majority of my coaches, I’ll give you a great example.
Chris Cooper: 17:45 You run a gym and three of your coaches say “we need more clients. You need to lower your rates so we can get more clients in the door.” You as the owner might feel very pressured to listen to them and say, well, you know, they’re kind of voting for it. Uh, you know, I feel like it’s a democracy here. I feel like I have to lower my prices. But you know, as an educated and informed owner that you’re only really going to hurt the coach’s income by doing that. So you need to resist that change. Okay? So number one was the right thing to do for the majority of my clients, not every client. Second, what’s the right thing to do for the majority of my coaches, maybe not every coach. And then the third thing you have to ask yourself is, is this part of our path or is this part of the hedge?
Chris Cooper: 18:31 So part of the path means that doing this idea carries you closer to your goal, right? It aligns with your vision. I’m sure you’ve all heard that before, but what this means is that by doing this idea, adding this program, running this thing, does that bring me closer to my overall goal or does it slowed down my process? Am I still walking on the path or am I jumping in the hedge? A hedge is when you’re not completely confident in your main program offering. And so you offer kind of an alternative. You know, it’s like, I think this gym is gonna pan Out, but I’m going to get a job at the bakery just in case. That’s my hedge. Or do you know my gym is breaking even. It’s only even breaking even for about three years. I’m going to start a tee shirt company. You launch a hedge product because you’re not confident that your primary product is going to take you where you need to go.
Chris Cooper: 19:26 Okay. And obviously when you’re in involved in a hedge product, you’re not on the path anymore, you’re not headed moving forward. So what I want you to ask yourself is, will this project take me forward in my business or is this just a hedge because I don’t actually believe that my path is the right one or that my primary service is going to take me where I need to go. What attracts you to hedges? Nobody’s walking down the path and just thinks, I’m going to jump in that hedge. What attracts you to hedges are the shiny objects that are buried in them. For example, you are excited to create brand new t shirts and you love wearing crossfit tee shirts like I do. And you love having like, you know, catchy insider slogans on them. Like “there’s a fine line between questioning authority and drinking poison in the jungle. “
Chris Cooper: 20:15 You know, something like that from Mark Twight. Well, nobody gets that quote except for you. But you have to design your own tee shirt, you think. And so you’re going to start a tee shirt company. Cause this ain’t hard, right? Everybody can set up like a store on Etsy or something now. And so you deep dive and for the next two weeks all of your thoughts are good ones. You’re excited, you’re launching this brand new program. All your efforts are going into t shirt designs and you’re like learning how to set up your store online. And eventually somebody buys two tee-shirts wow. And you like put up the link on Facebook and you put up the link on your members group and on your website even. And people are starting to buy a couple
of designs and you’re making three, four, five, maybe even thousands of dollars. Okay.
Chris Cooper: 20:55 But you’ve also spent two weeks not walking down the path, not moving your business, the big engine, big financial driver of your success. It’s still sitting back there from two weeks ago and you’ve got to walk back, eventually scrape up what’s left of it and push it on down the path. Again. You’ve probably lost all your momentum and I promise you this guys, if you’re attracted to too many shiny objects, you’re going to get pulled left and right. You’re going to go every direction but forward and eventually you’re going to get pretty damn tired. And so when I say ask yourself, is this on the path or is this a hedge you have to be very aware of, are you confident that you’re on the right path right now? And if you’re not, then you need to talk to your mentor. And if you think maybe my mentor has me on the wrong path, then you should try a call with a different mentor just to make sure, all right.
Chris Cooper: 21:45 If you have a written project proposal and you’ve thought through all the details and it’s good, we’re still not going to adopt it wholesale. Okay? We’re still not going to put the crossfit kids program at 4:30 Tuesdays and Thursdays on the program forever. You’re going to start with is an addition to annual plans. You’d take out your annual plan template and you’re going to write in, we’re going to test this for an appropriate amount of time, three months at the Max, okay? As Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Nobody ever executes a textbook launch of a new program or an idea. It just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t exist. What you need to do is moderate the potential downside and the potential downside is time. So for example, if you’re going to change your schedule because you think it’s going to save you money or save you time or make a better class for people, you should release your schedule in three month blocks so that you’re free to go back, okay?
Chris Cooper: 22:41 You’re free to change your mind. You’re free to say, whoops, that was wrong and not suffer the consequences. Okay? So you need, first of all, to plan any new idea is going to require a revision. You need to build in some kind of margin to change it, fix it, upgrade it, whatever. Second, you need to have a fixed timeline. So the first time you run out a CrossFit kids program, you’re going to run it out for six weeks or eight weeks. And Gretchen has a great blog post about that. The reason you do that is because maybe everybody loves like your wine and Yoga night on the first Friday that you run it, maybe less so on the second Friday and maybe by the third Friday it’s you all alone in the gym on Friday night with a box of wine and you’re punching yourself in the face.
Chris Cooper: 23:27 The next thing that you have to do is objectively measure the success of your idea. So after three months, maybe you and one other client still loves wine and Yoga night, okay? But it’s losing you money and it’s taking up a spot on your Friday night that you could be spending with your family and maybe you could put a kid’s class in there or something that would actually work. So the reason that we say in the beginning, here’s how we’re going to objectively measure success is so that three months down the road we can take that evaluation and say like, is this working or is it not? The last thing is we need to test only one thing at a time, and I mentioned this before with like the creatine, protein BCAAs example. If you are just starting, if you’ve got a brand new website and you sign up for Uplaunch and you’re running Facebook marketing and affinity marketing all at once and your revenue goes up, which one of those four actually caused the revenue to go up?
Chris Cooper: 24:18 You might be tempted to think like, oh, my website is awesome. My revenue has gone up $3,000 a month since I switched websites. That’s so great. But that increase might actually have come from the Facebook marketing or from a new lead magnet that you’ve been using or from up launch or something else. So whenever possible, unless you’re in a panic like state of emergency, I got to try everything, test one thing at once, measure the effect and then build on that. So go back to our first point, which thing to try. The first thing that you want to try is that the first domino in the chain of fact When you’re going through the incubator, you’ve been taught to ask the question what goes before what and so if you’re looking at all these different options, should I do Facebook marketing? Should I do uplaunch?Should I get a new website?
Chris Cooper: 25:03 The first thing you want to ask yourself is which one of these magnifies the others? If I make it better, okay, now you might actually think like improving my coaching is what’s going to magnify everything else and a lot of us believe that when in the first couple of years of owning a business, if I’m just the best coach, I have the best coaching staff, then I’m going to have the best business. The problem is that we need to make sure that we’re pushing over a domino that has other dominoes following it. It is not enough to be a 10 out of 10 on coaching and a one out of 10 on business. You need to do the things that are going to push over the Dominos in the business line. And so what comes before? What is a question best asked by context and experience.
Chris Cooper: 25:47 So you say to your mentor, I’ve got these three opportunities. The first opportunity is add crossfit kids. The second opportunity is get better at sales and third opportunity is start a T-shirt company. Okay? And if you’ve seen the lego movie, you can picture like Benny building the spaceship spaceship, spaceship, spaceship. Most people choose spaceship, they want to launch the tee shirt company because it’s novel and exciting. The Smart Entrepreneur turns to their mentor and says, which one of these things do I need to do? And the mentor says if you get better at sales training, that’s going to magnify the effects of your tee shirt company. You’ll sell more tee shirts. It also magnify the effects of how many people you can pu
t in your crossfit kids program cause you’ll be better at selling that program. Sales comes before those other two things. So you should focus on that first.
Chris Cooper: 26:37 Now that doesn’t mean you have to go through the pain of saying, I’m never, I’m never going to do those other things. You don’t have to say that you can actually have everything. You can do everything. You just can’t do it all right now. So you have to say to yourself, here’s my annual plan. I can do retention, I can work on sales. I get starved marketing, surely to have more money. But if I’m better retention, every new lead that I get coming in through the door will stay longer and I won’t have to do as much selling. And then if I learned sales, if I practice my no sweat intro in every lead that I generate from Facebook is more likely to sign up. So I have to do fewer, no sweat intros. The better at them I get. And the longer that I’m keeping people, the fewer new clients that I need.
Chris Cooper: 27:25 I don’t have this flywheel of needing 30 new clients every eight weeks. So if I get good at this thing, which is the least sexy, I can really magnify my results with the next thing. Okay? And it’s, Shawn just brought up, it is very tough to do one thing at a time. You know, we’re entrepreneurs, we are attracted to those shiny objects. We love hedges, right? We’ve taken this risk, but we still want the parachute. The hardest part. But also the secret to success in entrepreneurship is doing one thing at a time, objectively measuring the results, saying yes, this is working or no, this is not actually the answer. And then building onto the next thing. All right, I didn’t give you guys a few examples here. Whenever we ask questions, who here has the best website? What kind of answers are we going to get?
Chris Cooper: 28:17 Well, you know, my website seems to be working well and so we asked the question like what does a website, a website, it’s job is to capture leads coming in from social media or even from local people who are looking for more information and convince them to come and meet you in person. That’s a website is job. Okay. I think of the website is the boat. And think of Facebook as like one fishing net. Think of Instagram is another fishing net. Think of word of mouth as another fishing net and, and you’re just trying to bring the fish back to the boat. The boat’s job is to get the fish to shore. So when we’re saying who has the best website, what we’re really asking is who is converting the greatest percentage of traffic that comes onto that website into the next step: A no-sweat intro.
Chris Cooper: 29:02 That is the only valid measure of how good a website actually is. However, if we’re not considering that metric, if we don’t know that, then we’re going to rate our website based on completely different criteria. So if I asked five people here, like who’s got the best website, somebody is going to say mine’s the best. It’s the most artistic. Somebody else is gonna say, mine’s the best. We have like video instead of still photos. Someone else will say mine’s the best because we don’t use this revolution slider anymore. And somebody else might say, well, we have the clearest call to action, but the bottom line is like none of that matters unless you’re measuring conversion. If you don’t know what your conversion rate is on your website, then you don’t know if you have a good website or not. There are plenty of other examples out there in business.
Chris Cooper: 29:49 If I say, who’s got the best retention? And I ask, you know, I put a thousand affiliate owners in the room, how’s your retention? Every single person will say, it’s awesome. We keep everybody, everybody loves us. I think our retention has got, we don’t even have to talk about it. You don’t even have to say the word anymore. Strike it from the dictionary. Take it out of your books, take it out of the incubators, skip that section. Fast forward that video retention is amazing, but if you’re not measuring it, you have no idea if it’s amazing or not. And so step one is what’s your LEG? How long does the average person stick around at your gym? Then we say, if your LEG is 13 months, which you know in our last measure of Two-Brain gyms, that was it, 13 months, what would happen if we increase that leg by three months?
Chris Cooper: 30:32 And The answer in that case was another $40,000 a year in profit to the average gym owner. So that’s based on 150 members paying 150 bucks a month. If you could keep each of those people for three months longer than they’ve been kept in the past, you will net another $40,000 you know there’s no marketing cost to that. You don’t have to acquire them, but this is what people don’t measure. I’ll give you another question. How profitable are you? We’re about breaking even, most people say, and the reason is that they don’t objectively measure how profitable they are. If you ask less educated affiliate owners than the people in this group, what’s the best floor scrubber? They’ll say bulldog is the best. You know, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done for our gym. The follow up question should be obvious. What else have you done for your gym?
Chris Cooper: 31:16 But it’s usually not because their scope of reference is completely different than ours. I might like the viper better because it’s more artistic. The graphics are the best. Maybe the bulldog uses less soap. I have no idea. Okay. These are just, you know, examples. If you ask two people what’s better: Kill Cliff or fit aid, they’re measuring success on completely different scorecards. Well, this one tastes better. Well, this one has a bigger profit margin. Well, this one, my clients like better. Well, this one sells fast. We need to know exactly what you’re measuring and I’m not going to say to you, this is the metric that’s most important in any case except for profit, ARM, LEG, longterm value. You can decide, but the point is that you have to decide in advance. All right.
Chris Cooper: 32:02 I always start too many things without following completely through. That’s changing slowly. Really man. Like that’s what my own mentors are there for. You know it, it’s hard to build the habit of following one thing through. I thought it would get easier. The more successful I became, it actually gets harder because, uh, I don’t hear good ideas and bad ideas anymore. I hear amazing ideas and excellent ideas and I have to decide which one of these things am I going to do right now. Now I have a COO in my, in Two-Brain. I have a GM in my gym. Their job is to deliver an excellent service through perfect execution of operations. Okay? They have to be operationally excellent. They have to take the policies and the processes that I’ve put in place and make sure that they’re followed to a 10 out of 10 when we change something like that, their input is invaluable because they’re going to say, well, how am I going to do this?
Chris Cooper: 32:53 How am I going to affect this change? How will this affect everything else that we do? And so one of the key benefits to having an operations manager, GM in your gym, whatever, is that they have to think through. Can I still deliver an excellent service? If we make this change and their job is to ask you that question too. It’s like your liver has a voice and the voices saying, Corey, if you take this protein supplement and bcas, am I going to be able to use both of those or am I just going to process break down most of those? All right, your GM is, is the left hand side of your brain for your creativity. This is a very common issue for entrepreneurs and that’s why I wanted to talk to you guys about how important it is to build a measuring stick for all of your ideas.
Chris Cooper: 33:36 Prioritize which ideas you work on, a objectively, measure the results. Also how critical it is to one thing at a time. So you’re not like blinded by 50 different things. I know that in Two-Brain we are certainly guilty of giving you too many amazing ideas at once. Every single day, One of us gets on here at two o’clock eastern runs a seminar, talks about hybrid memberships, selling nutrition in your gym, uh, finishing up the sales process, training your coaches, Facebook marketing, and you go away from these things and you’re probably more paralyzed than ever before. It was certainly true when I ran seminars and the reason that I stopped doing weekend seminars was because people would just listen for eight hours and take zero action. They’d be so paralyzed. The reason that we’re a mentorship program is so that when you feel overwhelmed or you notice that you’re taking less action than you did last week, that you say to your mentor, I need to decide more and more.
Chris Cooper: 34:29 Our job as mentors is to be filters, not idea machines, not you know, curators of possibilities, but filters that help you decide and stay focused. That’s exactly what I leaned on my mentors to do. They don’t give me ideas. They tell me to calm down. They tell me to look at the path instead of the hedge. They tell me that’s a shiny object, Chris. And they say, let’s put that on the back burner. Until December. So if you’re struggling with making up your mind, if you’re struggling to maintain focus, if you’re struggling to get traction, if you’ve spent one single day veering off the path, I want you to email or text your mentor and say, I need some help straightening this out. They are going to help by saying, this is your path. You don’t have to avoid this forever. You don’t have to stress about possibly for getting this great idea. All we have to do is wait and you can’t do everything, but you can do anything. So guys, I hope that helps. This is here for encouragement. Thanks for paying attention.
