Chris Cooper (00:02):
Which gyms in Two-Brain have the most clients, and how did they get those clients, and how are they keeping them? I’m Chris Cooper, this is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is my monthly leaderboard show where I take one of the key metrics that we track in Two-Brain, I report to you who’s doing the best and then I ask them, “How’d you do it?” and I share all the answers with you. Today, we’re tracking client headcount, and while client headcount in a coaching gym is one of the key drivers of success, you have to have enough clients. It’s also a multiplier of client value. So, for example, while just having a lot of clients alone is not enough to make your gym successful, having enough high-value clients is what actually counts. You’ve all heard of gyms out there who seem to be killing it with 300, 500, 800 members, but then when you look at their books, they’re barely profitable and sometimes not even profitable.
Chris Cooper (00:55):
On the other hand, you know personal trainers who maybe charge $800 or $1,200 a month, but they don’t have enough clients to pay for their bills. You have to have both, and when we break these metrics down, we can look at: What are the things that help you get more clients? What are the things that make those clients more valuable, and what are the things that keep those clients longer? And that is truly the recipe for a successful gym in Two-Brain. We look at these things together and separately, and today, I’m going to share with you how these gyms got all the members that they do have. So first, the leaderboard, the Top 10 gyms in Two-Brain this month, and what’s really impressive here is the international representation we’ve got this month. I love it so much. So coming in 10th, in Switzerland, a gym has 341 members.
Chris Cooper (01:41):
Now remember, this is a coaching gym. This is not a club gym where they’re just paying for access. These are people who are paying a membership for CrossFit, or they’re paying for a semi-private program, or they’re strength and conditioning gyms, and sometimes they’re like a youth specific gym, but whatever type of method the gym is using, these are people who are paying for coaching. It’s not a $50 a month membership. Coming in ninth, from the Netherlands: 410 members in a coaching gym. Again, these are high-value clients, and because it is a Two-Brain gym, you know that they’re not charging some ridiculously low thing with high churn, but I’ll come back to that. Coming in eighth, from Sweden: 422 members. This is a CrossFit gym. While these members are doing group classes, a large number of them are doing personal training or a combination thereof. In seventh place this month, from the UK: 432 members.
Chris Cooper (02:36):
Outstanding. Way to go. I can’t wait to learn from these gyms, and we’re going to do that next; I’m going to share their lessons with you. Coming in sixth from Denmark: 460 members. And coming in fifth, also from Denmark: 464 members. What’s really impressive here is that we’ve been through six gyms. This gym in fifth place has 464 members. We haven’t had a US gym yet, but that’s coming next. We haven’t had a Canadian gym yet. You know, go Canada. I want us on that leaderboard. We’re going to be working hard on that this month, and what’s crazy interesting is we’ve seen a lot of representation from Europe, which I love. Coming in fourth place, USA, one gym: 556 coaching members. Again, these are not people who are paying nine bucks a month for access. These are people in a coaching gym who are paying for coaching, massive difference in services.
Chris Cooper (03:30):
In third place, from Chile, this gym has been here before, and we’re going to hear their top tips again: 700 members in one location, one coaching gym. In second this month, Denmark: 703 members, one location, one coaching gym. And at the top of the leaderboard this month for the first time ever, a gym from Australia with 941 members. Now here’s what’s amazing: In Two-Brain, we talk a lot about the 150 model. That means that with 50 clients, you should be paying all of your bills. With 100 clients, you should be paying your bills and making more than you would make as a coach working for somebody else, as the owner. At 150 clients, you should be paying all your bills, making $100,000 a year or so and paying a full-time staff member and another part-time staff member. When you start by getting those numbers right, every member on top of that is you scaling up.
Chris Cooper (04:26):
So, if your model works at 150, when you get to 250, your model is crushing it. You’re really saving lives, and you’ve got a sustainable model, a good income, and you’re providing really good careers for coaches. If your model doesn’t work at 150, though dumping another 50 members on top will not fix the model. So, if at 150 clients you’re not paying your bills, you’re not making a really great income as the owner and you’re not paying a full-time coach, adding another 50 clients, getting to 200, will not solve those problems with your model. You’re going to hear that over and over today. So, without further ado, here are our top lessons from the top gyms in Two-Brain with the most members. I’m going to give you the direct quotes from these gyms in a moment, but first, there’s some common themes.
Chris Cooper (05:12):
First theme: To be big, you must have great retention, great funnels, good sales systems, and great general business systems that can be used by a large, cohesive team. This is very hard to do, but if you’re shooting for 200 members before you break even and pay yourself, these things will not be in place. It’s not going to work. Second, there are challenges to running big classes. One of these gyms runs classes of up to 80 people, but this is abnormal, and it requires elite-level management, not just elite-level coaching. This gym has low churn and a stable client count, but retention can be very hard in this model, and even a low churn requires a solid marketing and sales and intake plan. Again, if you’ve got a membership of 400 people and a churn rate of like 3%, you are going to be replacing a new member every day just to stay even.
Chris Cooper (06:06):
You have to have a systemized sales process, marketing and retention. And the third theme is start with the 150 model. Get your act together. Then grow with stability instead of riding this rollercoaster of chasing 200 clients and dropping back to 80 and doing some crazy marketing plan to get to 150 and dropping back, never making an income and just running out of time and money and going out of business. Alright, so here are the quotes from the gyms with the most members in Two-Brain: Number one, “We’ve been around this for about 12 months. This is a low point for us. We’re in Australia,” so you know which gym this came from, “and that’s why we’ve joined Two-Brain to help us go to the next level.” The next quote is, “Our membership is very stable with a low churn rate; it’s continually building because we focus on retention more than anything else.”
Chris Cooper (06:55):
“Specialty programs: While our general population classes form the bulk of our membership, we also offer highly attended specialized programs such as Legends for those over 60, Mom-Fit, which is a postnatal program, and our youth program. The Legends classes run every weekday with 18 to 25 participants daily. The Mom-Fit classes are held three times a week with 20 to 25 mothers attending, and our youth program is extremely popular as well.” That’s the end of that quote, but notice that this gym is really, really good at its core niche, and then it builds programs for its other niches like Legends, like new moms, et cetera. The next quote is about focus and operating at scale. They said, “Our specialization is in group training, and we strive to be the best at it. We offer 30-minute, 45-minute and 60-minute classes throughout the day, starting as early as 5:25 a.m. and running right through till 8:30 p.m. We have busy classes with some peak time seeing up to 80 participants in a class, and this would be our more bootcamp style class, but in our more traditional strength and conditioning classes, we still have 30 people attending.”
Chris Cooper (07:59):
Again, these people did not start by opening up a class time and hoping that 80 people showed up. They started by getting profitable and successful at 150 members and then adding these other things and then scaling up. Another quote is about client experience. They said, “I’ve incorporated many principles from professional sports into our gym operations to make them appealing to the general public.” They’re good at media. They’re good at hype. They’re good at promoting and talking about their members. Another quote is about client experience: “We’re focusing a lot on improving the service and coaching experience at our gym,” and another quote is also about client experience: “Our first rule is that our members need to leave the box with a bigger smile than when they came. Next to that is we put a big effort in remembering our members by name.” When you have 100 clients, you should know everything about every one of those clients.
Chris Cooper (08:50):
You should know their name, their spouse’s name, what they do for work, and what their kids do on the weekends at a minimum. As you scale, you can’t lose that personal connection with your members. You might not be able to remember everybody by name. As humans we’re limited to about 150 names, but that’s when you bring in staff, and that’s what scaling means is that you keep doing the basics remarkably well with the help of your staff. You don’t just stop doing them because now we’re too big to know everybody’s name because you’ve grown your business to be something just beyond you. When you have 200 members, you can’t know every client’s first and last name, their spouse’s name, what they do for work and what their kids do on the weekend. It’s too many people for our human brains to process. That’s when you add staff to scale yourself in these relationships, and again, you’ll notice that a lot of these quotes from leaders focus on retention.
Chris Cooper (09:45):
They’re not focused on: What’s the next marketing hack? How do I grow to 2,000 followers on Instagram? What is my front-end high-ticket thing that I can sell to people once and then have them wash out? They’re really focused on sustainability, and sustainability is about systems and retention. So, while you do have to have marketing and sales dialed in, you need them to be part of a larger system, and that’s what we mentor you on at Two-Brain. We want you to not just learn the latest marketing hack; we want you to build a marketing system that will work forever, and you can change little parts of as you need to, but 80% of it stays the same year over year. We want you to build a sales system, which is a process that you can do, but you don’t have to be the linchpin that you can train other people to do.
Chris Cooper (10:32):
If only your winning personality and your charming ways are what sign people up for the gym, you don’t have a system, and that’s what we train you to build is a system. You need to have a retention system. If your retention is entirely based on the interpersonal relationships that were formed by your first 50 clients, then you don’t have a retention system. You just have a buddy system. That’s not going to scale to 150, 300 clients, et cetera. If you have separate deals with each one of your trainers—I’ll pay you 50%, I’ll pay you X per hour, and I’ll pay you whatever—you don’t have a staff system. What you have is just a bunch of relationships individually. That doesn’t scale. You can’t do that. If you are just depending on people to come in and shadow you, watching classes, then you don’t have a training system for your staff.
Chris Cooper (11:20):
You need to build that too. If you just depending on them to go out and get their CrossFit L1 or their blue belt in jiu-jitsu or you know whatever the kickboxing thing is, then you don’t have a training system. You’re relying on somebody else to handle your staff hierarchy and ascension model for you. You need to build systems for all these, including paying yourself. If you don’t have a strategy for paying yourself and you just take what’s left over, then you don’t have a payroll system. You don’t have a growth system. Look, mentorship is all about building these systems and then training you in skills to become a better entrepreneur. You do not get to 900 clients at your gym without being a good entrepreneur, and notice that even the best entrepreneurs, the people who have a very high number of clients in their gym, these are the people who are most likely to seek a coach.
Chris Cooper (12:12):
It’s why professional athletes seek a coach because they’ve learned the value of coaching transcends its cost. Amateurs see coaching as an expense. Professionals, the people who are at the top of this leaderboard, seek out as much coaching as they can get because they know it’s an investment. Two-Brain measures the ROI that we produce in our clients, just like we measure how many clients they have and what their ARM is and how long they keep clients. We want to make sure that we’re giving you an amazing return on our investment, and I’m fully convinced that there is no better investment that you can make as a gym owner than investing in mentorship with Two-Brain, and I built our program with that in mind. If you want to start for free, if you want to get talking to a few Two-Brain mentors, to 9,500 other gym owners around the world, get some free resources to make some money and get you started—right?
Chris Cooper (13:06):
Amazing, infinite ROI. You pay nothing, and you get this thing that makes you money—all you have to do is go to gymownersunited.com. You can join that group for free. The price of the group is just be a good citizen. Help where you can, be polite, be kind, and look for opportunities to help. You can join that group for free. We’ll help you, you’ll help others, and we’ll grow this entire movement together. Thank you for being part of this movement. Thank you for serving humanity. This is the “Run a Profitable Gym” podcast. I’m Chris Cooper.
