I don’t give the same advice I did back in 2018.
“Two-Brain Business,” my first book, is the bestselling fitness business book of all time. And about 30 percent of it is wrong now.
For example, I no longer tell gym owners that an open-gym option is a good idea. In 2012, it was a great idea. Now it’s an expensive mistake.
Conversely, some of the stuff that stopped working in 2010—like a free trial class—had a short run of success for a few weeks after the first round of COVID lockdowns, so we changed our recommendation.
A mentor’s job is to evaluate all possible options with a critical eye. That means never becoming permanently “married” to one strategy or tactic.
Too many gurus write a book about one big idea and then spend the rest of their career trying to defend that idea. I don’t do that. I don’t want to.
Instead, I want to use data to constantly evaluate what’s working now, and then upgrade our curriculum to reflect proven strategies.
That means our course content, our free content and our mentorship change about 20 percent every year.
Because things change.
Our mentoring team is retrained every year because things change.
Mentors: Always Upgrading
Our Incubator program was built in 2016, and it’s been overhauled four times since then. The current RampUp period of our mentorship program—the first stage—replaced the Incubator in the spring of 2020, and we immediately built it over to include online coaching.
I keep buying resources from people so we can include them in our mentorship program. When an owner in Two-Brain writes a blog post that gets a lot of responses, we buy the rights to it and share it with everyone else. We do the same with social-media posts and standard operating procedures and anything else you can think of.
Every month, we look at the best gyms in 15 different categories, like average revenue per member, retention, profit and lead generation. We interview the top gyms in each category, looking for the little things they’re doing that no one else has done. Then we test their ideas in other gyms and release the proof to the members the Two-Brain family.
This just seems like the logical way to grow a movement: find the best, teach the rest.
Eventually, everyone in the Two-Brain family proves to be the best at something; we buy their ideas and give them to everyone else.
We update our RampUp and Growth Stage modules every single year and we give them to our current clients for free because “best” is a moving target, and we want them to be the best.
Are You a Good Fit?
When I invite someone into our mentorship program, I’m making a bet on them. All the stuff in our program is repeatable for life, but most need to see a fast return on investment. So when we commit to a client, we have to go all in. And we can’t do that with everyone.
When you book a call to talk with my Acceptance Team, you have a 35 percent chance of being invited into our mentorship practice. That number has actually gone down over the years, and we track it religiously.
Let’s chat about it. Book a free call to see if you’re a good fit.
Other Media in This Series
“What Is Mentorship in the Fitness Business?”
“The Power of Focus”
“Action Is Everything (Why We Don’t Sell Courses)”
“Cleaning up the Business of Business”
“11 Things We Learned From COVID (The Fitness Industry’s New Normal)”
