Chris Cooper (00:02):
Humans need gyms. I’m Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” We have been evolving as a species for thousands of years. Every generation has worked hard to increase their health span, their lifespan, and their wealth, and we’ve come a long way, but now things are going backward. For the first time in history, human lifespan is shortening. We have access to food and technology and science like we’ve never had before, but we face new challenges of abundance and consumption and inactivity. For the first time, we have to make time to be physically active. For the first time in history, we have to make choices about the food that we eat, or we will die younger, sicker and sadder than our parents did. The sole bastion against this reversal of evolution is gym owners and trainers, and there should be enough of us to turn the tide.
Chris Cooper (01:01):
Every single year, 10,000 new trainers and gym owners join our army that’s marching against the evil of wasted potential and shortening lifespan. But the problem is that every year, 9,000 of us quit. So, our ranks are growing but not quickly enough to turn the tide. Two-Brain stands at the forefront of this battle. Why did you and I become trainers and coaches? The simple answer is that we want to help others, but the more complicated answer is that many of us have had our own health and fitness transformation. Many of us have seen depression, obesity, and sickness reversed by the pursuit of fitness and health, and we want nothing more from life than to share that knowledge, joy, and wellbeing with others. We give up meaningful careers to do that. We turn our backs on potentially lucrative jobs in the name of service. We just want to help other people.
Chris Cooper (01:57):
So why do so many of us quit? We never quit because we lose our passion for service. We never quit because we’re tired or exhausted. We never quit because the work is too hard. We never quit because we’re hungry or tired. We quit because we run out of money. Those other things do happen. We can get burned out. We can get depressed. We can get exhausted. We can risk our marriages, our income, our homes. We can bear all of that, but all of those things happen because we run out of money. Sometimes we just run out of time. We start fixing our gym, and things are looking a little bit better, and then unfortunately, boom, our gym is still fragile enough to suffer from one major setback. Our landlord raises the rent or 10 clients leave, or one of our key staff members opens up their own gym, and we’re done.
Chris Cooper (02:46):
That’s it; we’re that fragile. Our businesses are fragile enough to be wiped out by one fell swoop. The government makes a new law that nobody expected. We’re done. We’re out of business. Ten or 20 years of serving people, expanding their health, keeping them out of the hospital, keeping them working, keeping them paying taxes, and then the power bill goes up, and we’re done. The gym business, the fitness business, is fragile. Now, fitness, this isn’t a brand-new idea. People have been helping other people get healthy and fit and eat better and exercise for over 100 years. There’s no reason for our businesses to be this fragile or for our industry to be so immature. By immature, I don’t mean dumb; I mean that we’ve not learned the lessons required to make meaningful careers, yet. We don’t know exactly how to run profitable gyms. At least we didn’t.
Chris Cooper (03:40):
And the reason that we didn’t have these lessons, this knowledge, is that nobody was gathering it and sharing it. Nobody was creating a body of knowledge, applying the filters of proof to all the claims in our industry. Nobody was collecting data to say, “Here’s what works, here’s what doesn’t, here’s the straight up bullshit, and here’s how you spot a liar in our midst.” Nobody was out there doing that until now. The thing that makes our gyms anti-fragile, that helps us grow as professionals in the toughest industry in the world, is data. The foundation of all our decisions as gym owners and trainers must be rooted in data, or we will always have fragile gyms and short careers. Now it’s tough to gather data if you’re a single gym owner working your tail off 14 hours a day all by yourself, living on this fitness island, largely disconnected from other gym owners, largely disconnected from the overwhelming body of knowledge.
Chris Cooper (04:40):
You can be as scientific as you want in your own gym. I tried to be, but here’s the problem: Every time you change one little thing in your business, you’re taking a risk. If people don’t like the change, they will use it as an excuse to give up on their pursuit of fitness. If your prices go up because your family is starving, people will quit and give up on their journey of fitness. If you buy a new car, people will think that they are being charged unfairly, and they will give up on their pursuit of fitness. If you run a Facebook ad that gets new members in, you might celebrate for a day and then regret it for a year because all of your current members quit. And when you do something that pisses off your current members, they will go out smoking. They will make it feel like the worst breakup of your life, but still, you have to do these little experiments, and what prevents you from having to do them all yourself?
Chris Cooper (05:30):
I mean, if you don’t do the experiments, you’ll never grow. You’ll never know what works. You’ll never advance your gym. You’ll never make a better living for yourself and your family. You’ll be caught; you’ll be paralyzed in staying the same forever. You have to do them. But how do you avoid the pain of doing science, of turning your gym into a Petri dish and losing people as you change things and then changing your mind and losing more as you change it back? Doing experiment after experiment? Well, the way that you avoid the pain is that you connect with other gym owners who are also doing science, who are running their own experiments, who are collecting data and saying, “Here’s what actually works. Here’s what doesn’t work, and here’s the proof.” There has never been a unifying force in our field. Other fields, other industries, have governing bodies.
Chris Cooper (06:14):
They have licensing agencies. They have regulatory commissions. They have associations. They have science. They have data. They share the science of their practitioner’s growth. Why do you think scientists are in high demand? Because there’s so much BS out there, so much misinformation. Why do you think doctors make more than fitness coaches? It’s because they’ve been doing the science for 2,000 years. They’ve been running experiments, and they know what works to change the health of their patients. Why do you think surgeons charge more than doctors? Not because their work is more valuable, because it’s more urgent, and it works. They save lives, and they save lives because of science. They’re no longer bloodletting. They’re no longer attaching leeches to your body. They’re not talking about the four humors of the body like the ancient Greeks did. They’re doing science, and the science of gym ownership is measuring what works along six different metrics.
Chris Cooper (07:09):
If you’re a solo gym owner out there on your own, you have to do science all by yourself. You have to run Facebook ads. You have to run enough Facebook ads to figure out how they work. You have to spend $10,000 on Facebook ads before you even know if they do work. You have to ask for referrals. You have to do 100 reps of asking referrals before you get good at it, and only then can you ask yourself, “Is this even working?” You have to post to social media every day for three years. You have to take the pictures. You have to write the posts. You have to make up the little hashtags. How do you know if they’re any good? Trial and error. And it can take you 10 years to get good at social media. You have to create your own media, your blog posts, your YouTube, your podcasts like this.
Chris Cooper (07:51):
You can’t rely anymore on CrossFit or dance studios or the TV stations to do that for you. You have to be your own media company, but it takes 10 years to get good at blogging. I’ve been doing it for 25 and I’m a B+ blogger at best. How do you get good at this stuff fast? How do you know what works on Facebook? How do you know which Instagram posts are likely to land? How do you know what kind of blog you should publish? What kind of video you should shoot? What kind of podcast you should be recording? You ask people who have done it successfully and are doing it successfully and are doing the science to get better. How do you know who those people are? You look at their metrics. You ask them to prove it, and then you take what they’ve done, and you copy it.
Chris Cooper (08:34):
Here’s where gym owners go wrong. They seek opinion instead of data. So, all of us do this. We go into a Facebook group, and we say, “Hey, who’s running Facebook ads?” And you get 10 responses, and three responses will say, “Facebook ads don’t work,” and three responses will say, “Facebook ads are bullshit. You don’t need them.” And two responses will say, “I’m crushing it. I get 57 leads per month,” but one of those is lying, and then the last two people will try to sell you their ad service. That’s not data; that’s opinion. We want to know as gym owners: Do Facebook ads still work? How much do they cost? How much time should I put into this? And if I want to jump over three years and $10,000 of learning, who can I copy? The way that we find this out, how it works, how it works best, who to copy is that we find the best people, the people who are worth copying, and then we build models based on what they’re doing, and we grow our gyms based on those models, and therefore we elevate the industry through the collection of data.
Chris Cooper (09:34):
Only Two-Brain is doing this, and only we can do this at such a large scale. Why are we doing this? Why are we collecting this data, asking you to fill out this survey, publishing this guide? Because I want to sell you mentorship. Yes, I do. I want you to benefit from this data. I want you to make money from this guide. I want you to make decisions based on our models. I want you to capitalize on my science and eventually hire a coach, a mentor. We’re all coaches. We all understand the value of coaching, whether we’re doing amazingly well or really poorly. We all know that we can go farther faster with a coach, but I also want you to help me elevate the industry. I want us to do science together. I don’t want to do any more guessing. I don’t want to lose another 9,000 gyms every single year in the mission to change people’s health.
Chris Cooper (10:23):
We know what to do, but we can’t do it if the clock is ticking, and our gym runs out of money too soon. We cannot reverse the de-evolution of our species if our gyms and trainers are going bankrupt in three years. I want your gym to last 30 years. I want your coaching to benefit your clients for their entire lifetime. The only thing stopping that is not your passion. It’s not your knowledge. It’s not your skill. It’s not your sense of service. It’s not your willingness to grind or your willingness to starve. The thing that’s stopping your impact is that you run out of money too soon. My job is to help you stop that, and the best tool that I have to stop that is science, and our State of the Industry survey is the root of that science. I want you to take our State of the Industry survey.
Chris Cooper (11:12):
It will take you—I just measured some of the speeds—it’ll take you between three and eight minutes. If you’re cautious or if you don’t know your metrics well, you want to put the extra time into it, eight minutes is what I ask. If you’re super-duper fast, you know the metrics off the top of your head, and you’re a quick typist, three minutes is all it takes. What we’ll give you in exchange is, first, access to the data. We publish a very thorough report. Here it is on all the data and what it means every single year. We’ll share it with you. You don’t have to be a data analyst. We’ll tell you what it means. I’ll also give you a bonus package of a whole bunch of really valuable Two-Brain materials. Those are your prizes, but those of you who are truly invested in this industry and invested in changing lives, in making a good living for yourself and your family, I know that you’re not going to be tempted by prizes.
Chris Cooper (12:02):
What you’ll be drawn to though, like me, is impact. I know that you’ve always been drawn to making an impact, and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re participating in the evolution of the human species by first creating an evolution within the industry that will extend the life of the human species by keeping you in business longer. You can help more people. You can help people for 30 years instead of three. You can magnify your impact by keeping people at your gym longer. You can create a legacy by building a gym that somebody will someday take over and continue. You will not fail. I hope you participate in the State of the Industry data. I’m going to post the link to the survey below. I know that I ask you every single year, but this is how science is done—through repetition, consistency, measurement, analysis, and finally, growth. Thanks for doing science with me. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is the start of our data collection period for the State of the Industry data. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your science.
