Chris Cooper:
Last night, I got a text from somebody who I really like, and they said, Chris, your free material has been amazing. It’s really changed my gym, but I’m not sure I wanna sign up for mentorship. I just want to keep using the free stuff. I’m just gonna keep going and maybe figure it out on my own.
My name’s Chris Cooper. I’m the founder of Two-Brain Business, the largest gym mentorship company in the world for micro gyms.
And today I’m gonna talk about how acquiring more knowledge is not the thing that’s going to solve your problems. This is a trap that a lot of gym owners fall into and it paralyzes them. And it’s not just gym owners. You see this in every industry and the trap is, the acquisition of knowledge actually stops you from taking action.
Now, if this is a helpful episode for you, I’d love to have you hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. So I know to keep creating content like this to help you. Now, I see this problem come up a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And it’s even something that I see on social media a lot.
Let me paint this picture for you. One of your friends on Facebook says, my goal is to read 50 books this year, or maybe somebody on Instagram posts a picture of this stack of books that they’re gonna read on vacation. And maybe they make a comment.
Like, I listen to so many podcasts that I have to listen to them all at 2X speed . Well, these are all flags for me as a business mentor, who is charged with getting people results. Because the really successful entrepreneurs in any field don’t do this.
They don’t worry about the volume of knowledge that they’re acquiring. They worry about acquiring the knowledge they need to take action.
The best entrepreneurs in the field will not read 200 books this year. The best entrepreneurs in the field are more likely to read five books this year, twice each. Or even one book this year on which they take dramatic action and keep doing that action over and over, or even, you know, maybe they read 10 or 20 because I find it tough to get through 20 books even in a year because I’m taking notes.
I’m repeating the important sections, even though it’s my job to gather information from other fields and translate that into the gym owner’s world. If it works and I test it out like it’s my job, then one book a week is still a pretty tall order. And so I have to ask if you’re reading 50 books and you’re listening to 10 podcasts on 2X speed , how much of that information are you actually acting on?
How much can you possibly have time to act on compared to what you’re taking in?
Now, this has happened to me a million times, right? Stop me if you’ve heard this one, you get two thirds of the way through your audio book . And a friend of yours says, Hey, have you read “Build”? And you say, no, no, no. Sounds great. Let me put that on my list for next. And you get through the first audio book that you’re listening to right now. And maybe it’s like “Rocket Fuel” by Gino Wickman, right? A very actionable book. And then the next book comes up as ready to play next. And you’re like, yes, I can’t wait to start this new book, because we’re all attracted to novelty. And so you have started the “Build” book right away before you take any action on the Gino Wickman book, you know?
Ask me how I know this is true. It’s because it’s happened to me a thousand times for many, many years. Before I had a mentor, I was reading audio books every single day. I was writing out, you know, the lessons for myself. I had this hour to listen to audio books every single day. And this was even before podcasts. And I would just download the audio books onto this MP3 player.
And I would plug it into my truck with the old cigarette lighter adapter. You remember that? And I would listen for an hour every day and guess what? My business wasn’t growing. Theoretically, I knew a ton, just like your clients theoretically know a ton about fitness and nutrition, but they don’t apply it. Naval Ravikant once said on his podcast, if knowledge was the answer, we would all be billionaires with six pack abs.
Knowledge is not the solution. And Naval, like a lot of high performers, has a mentor to help them cut through all the noise, all the overwhelm, all that potential knowledge and just focus on “do this one thing right now.”
That’s where a great mentor works. And that’s the difference between mentorship and the material that we hand out. The stuff that we put in our courses, the stuff that we give away at GymOwnersUnited.com for free every day .
Now, the stuff that’s in our courses is 10 times better than the stuff that we give away for free. So if you’re using our stuff that’s in my books or the stuff that we hand out for nothing at GymOwnersUnited.com, you need to know that the stuff that’s actually in our courses is 10 times more potent than that because it’s even more focused.
It’s very step-by-step. It’s completely actionable. And mentorship brings 10 times the value of that material again. So it’s not the method that’s as important as the mentorship, right? The stuff that’s in our courses is step-by-step. It’s backed by strong data. We’ve worked with over 2000 gyms.
We have a data set from 16,000 gyms. We produced 18 millionaires this year. I don’t know what else to tell you to prove that our stuff is valid, but the truth is that mentorship is what makes it actionable.
And so what will typically happen is when you get on a call with one of our mentors, the mentor will say, okay, here are your metrics. We know exactly how your business is doing, not just what you feel like it’s doing.
We’re going to look at these metrics and say, what are our biggest opportunities right now, then of all of those opportunities we’re going to say, here is the one tactic that you’re going to employ right now, today. Before we even end this call, you’re gonna start working on this thing.
And here are all of the resources, tools, and materials that you need to do it. We do it this way. Not because we’ve never tried anything else. Okay. In reality, 10 years ago, I was doing one-on-one business mentorship calls with gym owners.
I can’t believe it’s been a decade. I was working for this company called 321Go Project. And my calendar was full. I was working with about 45 gym owners a week, myself, and that was exhausting. And so what we decided to do was to build a course that was, like, the 10 most common conversations Chris has when he’s mentoring gym owners. How to build a staff playbook, how to do affinity marketing, how to lead your staff, et cetera .
And we would roll these into a course and we would make really amazing templates and materials that people could use. And then we would just sell the course first , slightly less than we were charging for mentoring. And the first time that we did it, 35 gym owners signed up and we thought, yes, awesome. This is how we scale.
This is how we teach gym owners to be successful really, really quickly. And so after three weeks, I called everybody who bought the course. And I said, how you doing? How, what action have you taken? Like, what was the first change you made? And about 10% of them said, yeah,
I’ve been going through the course. It’s really good. 10% said I haven’t started yet. The other 80% said, yeah, I went through it and I got a lot of valuable information. And I said, oh, that’s so exciting. What was the first thing you did? And they said, “Well, I haven’t really done any of it yet. And the information was good.
It was interesting . The templates look really good, but I haven’t made any changes.” And so I said, I’ll give you another three weeks. And I called them back three weeks later. And I said, okay, what have you done now? And they said, oh, you know, nothing. I kind of feel like, you know, I’ve got good information out of this. I know what I have to do, but I haven’t done it yet. And so after that six weeks, I said, something’s wrong here.
It’s my job as a mentor to get you results, just like it’s your job as a coach to get your clients results. If selling a course doesn’t do it, then I’m gonna go back to one-on-one mentorship.
And in 2016, I founded Two-Brain Business to deliver mentorship one-on-one to gym owners. Now there are over 40 mentors on the Two-Brain platform. These are people who have been through our program.
They’ve had successful gyms. They’ve been trained. There’s a six month long training process to be a Two-Brain mentor. They have to pass a very rigorous set of exams. They have to become certified so that they can be insurable.
These are not people who are winging it. These are not people who just woke up one day and said, I’m gonna be a business coach because I can make a few bucks and I’m gonna sell this to other people, right?
Those groups are out there. A mentor is not the same thing as having a business coach. A mentor works from a set of data. They work from a variable curriculum of things that have been tried and tested and proven again and again, with hundreds of gyms,
I think we’re at 2000 now. They know what they’re talking about, right? These are people who will not just show platitudes at you because that’s what you want to hear. Like, just love on your clients and they will stay.
Yeah, it’s a great initiative, but it’s not the truth. So back to acquiring knowledge, what I want you to do here for the next week is do a media audit and every piece of media that you consume, I want you to write down one action that you took after consuming that podcast, audiobook, even the free tools that we hand out .
And if you’re not taking action on any of those things, then you need to call a mentor. If you are taking action on one of those things, then you need to look at the source and say, this person can help me get to the next level and call them. And so if you’re going through our back catalog of materials, skip it, just get on a call with a mentor. A mentor will tell you what you need right now.
Instead of trying to learn everything about Two-Brain, reading all the books, hearing all the podcasts, watching all the YouTube, you know , asking your questions in Gym Owners United. You don’t have time for that. And so I want to finish up by saying the one thing that top performers in every field have in common is this.
They will not waste their time trying to figure it out when they don’t have to. In fact, the farther a person rises and grows in their entrepreneurial career, the quicker they are to buy the solution when they can.
And for most gym owners, the solution that you really need to be buying is focus. Not more knowledge. Hope that helps.
Mike Warkentin:
Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio! Be sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss a show. Now here’s Chris one more time with a final message.
Chris Cooper:
If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m in there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook .
