Chris Cooper: (00:00)
How do you hire amazing people who are a perfect cultural fit and want to work for you? My name’s Chris Cooper. And today I’m gonna describe the hiring process that we follow for mentors at Two-Brain Business. The hiring process for coaches in a gym is detailed step-by-step from job ads to interview questions, to payments, to contracts, to evaluations in our modules. And we teach that to people who sign up for our mentorship program. But I really wanna hone in on when you get to a high level and you’re attracting people to your mission and they wanna be part of it. How do you choose the right ones? How do you check for fit? How do you get them to apply? How do you select them? How do you train them? How do you keep ’em around? And so today, I’m gonna tell you the process that we follow to hire mentors at Two-Brain Business, because this process has evolved dramatically over time, producing better mentors who can get amazing results. So today we’re gonna walk through that step by step, and we are hiring from internal for about five more mentors this year, because we are growing so fast. So thanks for your support. If this podcast is helpful to you, please hit subscribe on your favorite platform or just send me an email and let me know so that I can do more topics like this.
Chris Cooper: (01:21)
So we have a lot of people, maybe one every week, ask me, “How can I work for Two-Brain Business?” And so I wanna lay that out. I’m gonna start with the three things that they have to have. I wanna talk about how that standard has gone up over time, and then I’ll tie it back into how it can help you pick future staff or coaches for your gym. So the first thing is they have to demonstrate knowledge. We hire from within because we need people to understand the Two-Brain process and be fluent in it. That’s number one. We know that there’s more than one way to grow a gym. And we teach a bunch of different models that people can choose based on their preference of how much time they want to spend coaching or growing their gym or doing other tasks.
Chris Cooper: (02:05)
The key though is that you have to have a model. You have to have a plan to follow. And you can make variations on the model, but if you don’t have a plan, you’re going to be in trouble. You’re gonna flounder around without any kind of direction and you’ll never get anywhere. So we want people to be fluent in and experienced with the models that we teach at Two-Brain Business. That’s knowledge, that’s step one, but really knowledge is not enough. So step two is they need to show proof that they can take action instead of just knowing what to do. Knowing what to do is something that you see a lot in the business community. There’s a lot of experts out there who quote-unquote “know what to do”, but they’ve never actually done it. And they’ve never been successful with it. And you know, who knows what the problem is?
Chris Cooper: (02:49)
Maybe they don’t take action. Maybe they don’t completely understand, whatever. But we want people as mentors at Two-Brain who have proven that they can take action and understand, instead of just knowing what to do. And so we usually select from our growth program at minimum, usually from our Tinker level program. So these are people who have a net worth of a million dollars or more. They’ve been in Two-Brain for at least a year. They know the processes, they’ve done the processes, they’ve been successful. That’s the second characteristic they have to show. Third, they have to be able to prove that they can get others to take the right action to grow themselves. It’s not just enough to know the answer. It’s not just enough to have done it yourself. It’s a specific skillset to be able to get other people to do it too.
Chris Cooper: (03:41)
Once talking to Greg Glassman, we were talking about this analogy of the brick layers and he was saying, it’s one thing to be a really great brick layer. It’s a completely different skillset to be the person who teaches brick layers. And it’s a dramatically different skillset to be the person who teaches the people who teach the brick layers how to lay bricks. And at the time when I spoke to him, Two-Brain was much smaller. I think we maybe had half a dozen mentors on the team. Now it’s close to 40. Now I understand what he meant. Being the person who teaches the people who teach the people to lay bricks is a dramatically different skillset. And so I’ve had to level up as time has gone on. And now every single month we get on a call with the mentor team and we share wins.
Chris Cooper: (04:29)
But most importantly, we share lessons. Here is what is happening now. An interesting evolution has happened in Two-Brain over the years: when we started out, I was still publishing a blog from my personal perspective, here is what I did at Catalyst. And that helped a lot of people because they could see, oh, well, here’s a model for starting to do referral marketing, or here’s a model for here’s how I do the CrossFit Open, or here is a model for a staff playbook or staff evaluations. And it was very, you know, “Copy what Chris does.” Today, it’s very, very different. Now what we do every month is we track gyms that are in Two-Brain. And every year we track data from over 16,000 gyms around the world with cooperation, from a lot of our partners. And we look at this data and we say, who is doing the best?
Chris Cooper: (05:19)
Who is setting the model? Who is doing something different? So every month we track these metrics and we create a leaderboard of the top 10 gyms for each metric: who has the highest average revenue per member, who has the most members, who is keeping people the longest, et cetera. After we publish that leaderboard, we interview the top gyms in the world. And these are the interviews that you hear on Two-Brain Radio almost every week from people who not only have taken the knowledge from Two-Brain and learned it, who have actually taken action on that knowledge and been successful at minimum. And so from that pool, you’ll often see a mentor selected, but that final criteria of “Can they teach it to someone else and get that other person value, results?” That is the tricky part. Now the ROI on our mentorship growth phase is something that we track every single month.
Chris Cooper: (06:15)
And in the last year it’s gone from just under 5X per month—so put a dollar in, get five out—to just over 11X per month. So right now, if you invest a dollar into growth phase, the average gym owner gets back $11 and 20 cents for every dollar they invest. That’s an amazing ROI. And it’s a reflection of choosing the right people who align with the mission and have the specific skillset. Trust me, there are dozens of people who are amazing, who know Two-Brain material better than I do, who can quote it back to me. And I’ll say, where’d you get that from? There are people who have been dramatically successful, but it takes a special person to be able to help others become successful. Now, let me bring this back to your gym. When you’re selecting coaches, it is very tempting to just look at your friends and say, they are great people, or to look at your clients and say, that person is great at yoga, or even to look at people who are doing other jobs for you.
Chris Cooper: (07:18)
“Oh man, that person is so, so, so good with our books. I’m gonna hire them to be a coach.” And just hire those people. But these are people who have only shown you maybe one or possibly two of the skills that you need if you’re gonna build an amazing team that’s aligned with your mission and has a great culture. What you actually need to do are look for these three phases. So, number one, knowledge. If they can demonstrate knowledge. You know, maybe they’ve been to their CrossFit L1 or, you know, maybe they are a great weightlifter and they can demonstrate that they are great at weightlifting, or they can demonstrate that they are great at yoga. That’s great. That’s prerequisite number one, they have to at least know the material. Prerequisite number two is, have they used that material successfully? So maybe if you’re working at a football strength/conditioning facility, maybe this person has used the knowledge to become a collegiate football player.
Chris Cooper: (08:10)
Fantastic. They’ve proven they can use the knowledge to benefit themselves. But that third step of being able to say, “I can use this knowledge. I can demonstrate success by using this knowledge and I can help you be successful by using this knowledge.” That is something that you have to watch for. And so I wanna give you a few tips here. If you run a gym and you’re looking for coaches who have all three of these attributes, then you actually want to look for the people who are sharing their knowledge to help other people in your gym. Now I know in years past a lot of gym owners have said, “Oh, I hate it when I’m coaching and there’s a class of 12 and people are coaching one another.” But what you have to understand is that the willingness to step in and help that other person is really important.
Chris Cooper: (09:02)
Now not everyone should be helping their neighbor, and sometimes that help can be distracting. But sometimes the person doing the helping sees a vacuum that you don’t see. They see a client at the back of the class who’s struggling to hold their back in the correct position during a deadlift. And so they step in to offer their help. If we’ve been primed to believe that that is interference or distraction or noise, we might step in and ask them to stop. But really, most of the time, these people want to help. Of course, there are outliers who are just doing it to feel important or who actually think that they know more than you do. And believe me, I’ve met both of those a few times, but when you have a client who is saying “Let me help you” to another client, that’s actually a sign that they might possess this high level skill that you want in your staff.
Chris Cooper: (09:57)
I’ll give you something else that you should be looking for. If you maintain a private Facebook group for your gym or your clients congregate somewhere online, other than in your gym, you want to look for the person who is sharing tips and videos and tactics, and “here’s what I did”. It’s not necessarily the person who is most enamored by the method, right? Like, here’s this amazing boxing routine that I got from the founder of another nine round franchise. It could just be, here’s a person who found this video on squat technique that really helped them get it. And they’re sharing that. When I’m looking for these traits in mentors, I’m looking for people who say, Hey, I just rewrote our staff playbook. Here it is. And they just freely give it to the other people in our group. Hey, I just made this amazing social media campaign on Canva.
Chris Cooper: (10:46)
Here it is. Copy it, put your own brand on it. Believe it or not, that happens a ton in Two-Brain because when you’ve created this culture of trust and sharing knowledge, without any of the BS filters of who’s got the best gym, then you get this kind of “we’re all in it together” sharing. And if you have established that culture in your gym, you probably will never have trouble finding coaches. I hope this helps you. If you’re in Two-Brain, we are posting for mentors. And we usually are. We post two to three times a year. If you’re outside Two-Brain, I want you to understand how we select and hire mentors and what our actual process is, because the people that we hire–and you can see them at TwoBrainBusiness.com/Mentors–have met all of these criteria. They know our material inside and out. So they know the stuff you can skip and the stuff you can use. They’ve proven themselves successful with the material to a very high level. And they’ve also shown how willing they are to do anything it takes to make you successful too. And if you can get any of these things from the coaches in your gym, you will build a world class facility. Hope it helps.
Mike Warkentin: (11:59)
That was Chris Cooper on Two-Brain Radio. Thanks for listening. Before you go, hit subscribe so you don’t miss a show. Now, Coop’s back to close it out.
Chris Cooper: (12:07)
We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group in 2020 to help entrepreneurs just like you. Now it has more than 5,600 members and it’s growing daily as gym owners join us for tips, tactics, and community support. If you aren’t in that group, what are you waiting for? Get in there today so we can network and grow your business. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook or GymOwnersUnited.com. Join today.
