Chris Cooper (00:02):
If you’re not getting your client’s results, you’re not a good coach. And if your business isn’t getting you results, it’s not a good business. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is our monthly leaderboard show when I talk about some of the top performers in Two-Brain, tell you exactly what they’re doing, and then I interview them to tell you how they did it. This month we’re looking at net owner benefit. That is the income that these leaders take from their gym every month. In other words, it’s the money that their gym provides to them and their families in the form of dividends or salaries or whatever that is—benefits—so that they can keep their family growing, but more importantly, keep their gym alive too. Look, if your gym isn’t profitable, it’s not sustainable, and if it’s not sustainable, you can’t get clients results that will last them the rest of their life.
Chris Cooper (00:50):
Today I want to feature the top 10 net owner benefit recipients in Two-Brain from last month. And then I’m going to tell you how they did it. Now, I was kind of surprised, to be honest, with the answers that these people gave, but I’m going to share all of them with you in a moment. First, let’s go through the top 10. Net owner benefit is the sum of the income that you make from your gym. You could take that income as a salary; you could take it as benefits. You could take it as in-kind payments, like your gym pays for your cell phone if you want to, or maybe your gym pays for the vehicle, whatever. This is the benefit that you receive from the gym. Every month we track these from the 930 gyms currently in Two-Brain, and we see who’s doing the best.
Chris Cooper (01:27):
We ask them, “How are you doing that well?” And then we share it with you for free. All of these numbers are in U.S. dollars. We convert them automatically so that we know that we’re comparing apples to apples. And I’m going to start with 10th place last month: The 10th place gym comes from the States, and last month they did $15,136.02. That’s take-home; that’s not top-line gross revenue. That’s what the owner took home from the gym. In ninth place—slightly better—$15,403.33. Congratulations. That’s an amazing income from a gym, and you deserve it. Next, in eighth place: $16,324.77. Now you can extrapolate this out over the year. Here’s another thing: When we’re looking at these numbers, we’re not looking for, like, a one-shot, one-hit-wonder. Maybe they didn’t get paid all year, and they took it all in one month.
Chris Cooper (02:19):
We don’t do that. We look at a rolling-three average. So, this is a sustainable, consistent income that these gym owners are making from their gyms that they deserve because they’re serving humanity in the greatest possible way. In seventh place: $16,622.67. Amazing. But we’re still going up. Now, let’s just pause for a second here. Imagine—I don’t know what you make right now—but imagine that you took home $16,622.67 last month from your gym. What would that mean to your family? Does that mean that your spouse can quit their job and work with you in the gym or just be more present for your kids’ activities? Does that mean that your kids are not going to have to worry about college or that you’re not going to have to worry about “How can I retire from this?” Those problems become solvable. Money solves money problems, and the first step in making a gym that changes your town is making a gym that’s sustainable enough to stick around long enough to change your town.
Chris Cooper (03:18):
And that means you have to be profitable. In sixth place: $17,933.33 take-home net owner benefit last month. Amazing. In fifth place, though, narrowly beating that: $18,000 exactly. So obviously this gym owner is setting themselves up on a recurring payment schedule of $18,000 per month. Now look, if you want to make progress with your net owner benefit, and I’m going to share some of their tips later on, but I’ll share my tip, the fastest way to do that is just to plan out raises in advance. Because you know what happens if you’re just running your business out of your checking account? You go out and you buy the coffee, and you go out and you buy this thing and that thing, and eventually it just drains your account. Right? There’s no plan to it. We follow a strategy in Two-Brain called Pay Yourself First, where we have people plot out how much they want to be paid and then work backward to figure out how much revenue they need, how many clients they need, and what those clients should be paying.
Chris Cooper (04:14):
And then they use those numbers to make decisions about expenses and expansion and team and hires and all that other stuff too. When you start with that, that creates the opportunity to actually earn more money. If you don’t start with that and you just take what’s left over out of the account at the end of the month, you’re going to earn very little—and sometimes zero. So, in fourth place, last month for net owner benefit in Two-Brain: $21,063. Incredible. Congratulations. You deserve it. In third place: $21,566. Amazing. Now every gym in the top 10, from tenth place to second place, came from the USA. Congratulations. The top two did not. The top two—and I’m going to report U.S. dollars here—but the top two were from outside the States. And that’s amazing for net owner benefit because it shows both the viability and the strength of Two-Brain gyms worldwide.
Chris Cooper (05:08):
The second-place gym in the world for net owner benefit last month came from Canada. Woo, go Canada, go. This is in U.S. dollars, though: $24,061—they took home last month. And again, this is not a one-time, one-hit-wonder. This is their average over the last three months. It’s recurring. Finally, the top NOB, net owner benefit, winner from last month came from the U.K., and they took home $25,771.68 U.S. Congratulations to everybody. Congratulations to everybody who’s winning the net owner benefit challenge. Congratulations to the people who are nowhere near this leaderboard, but are inspired by the winners and are ready to learn what the winners do so that they can keep their gym vibrant and strong and create opportunities for their staff and change their clients’ lives. Let’s talk about, now, how they did it. So, I’m not going to read these in any particular order because I don’t want to give away who the winners are, but the answers were both consistent and still a little bit surprising to me. When we went out and we interviewed all these winners, we said, like, “What did you do differently?”
Chris Cooper (06:15):
And the big shock to me was, “We didn’t really do anything different, but we’re very, very good at the basics.” And so, if you take away nothing from the rest of this podcast episode, I want you to remember that: It’s more important to do the basics consistently well than it is to try the new thing. If you’re looking for some novel new secret among these top 10 net owner benefit winners in the world, you’re not going to find it. And that was a big surprise to me. I was looking for somebody to say, “Oh, we’re doing this brand new thing on Instagram, TikTok,” whatever. Every single one of these people said, “We’re really, really good at following the Two-Brain prescription. We do what our mentor tells us. We do it again, and we do it again and again and again, and we look at our metrics, and when we know something is working, we go all in on that, and we repeat it to death.”
Chris Cooper (07:01):
So, I hope that doesn’t bore anybody. I think these answers are still really amazing to hear. Let’s get into them. The first respondent said, “It’s been a steady climb to this point, so it is expected that we would make this much money,” which means they understand their metrics. We want you, the gym owner, to understand your metrics, and they can actually use those metrics to forecast into the future, right? We said, “What did you do differently to reach this number?” And he said, “To be honest, nothing out of the ordinary. We’ve owned our first location since 2014, and we were in a pretty good place when we started Two-Brain, but that threw gas on the fire, and we’ve just grown since.” “Okay, what did you do that other gyms might not have done?” He says, “We did the un-sexy stuff consistently, and it pays off by compounding.”
Chris Cooper (07:45):
He said, “My email list, now, we’ve built it up to 7,000 people, so if we do a 5130 post, it has that much greater effect.” And it’s the same thing. You know, he repeats the stuff that he did in the RampUp program at Two-Brain, but he does it again, and every time it gets better; the results get better. It compounds, and he can just keep doing this forever. He says, “On Tuesday, I bought my building.” Hey congrats. And he said, “That might impact my NOB as I pay more rent to myself, but I bought the building for about $400,000, and it was undervalued too.” So not only is this person’s net owner benefit going up—their income—but by investing the extra income now they’re starting to build wealth and moving into the Tinker Phase. So, congratulations, I’m so proud to share these stories.
Chris Cooper (08:29):
I’m so proud of these gym owners and every gym owner who’s successful, whether they do it with Two-Brain or not. The next says, “It’s really a matter of knowing your skills.” So, he says, “I run the numbers side: I look at sales; I look at marketing; I look at growth while my wife looks after our staff really well.” So, the partnership that they have really compounds and grows them better. And he says, “We have a phenomenal staff of 14. We have two key hires that directly compounded in growth, and our efforts just compound every year. Now, this person has been in Two-Brain for eight years, and they just keep growing. And yes, he does do a great job of learning the new stuff because we do add new curriculum every single year. But what he is amazing at is knowing what he is amazing at and doing those things over and over and over again.
Chris Cooper (09:16):
Okay, so he says he follows the Two-Brain curriculum. Sometimes he’ll look outside for inspiration or energy or new ideas, but the bottom line is that they keep growing every single year. He’s been with Two-Brain since the beginning, and they just keep growing because their mentor reminds them to keep doing the basics consistently well. This next one was also a little bit of an echo of the one that I just read. He said, “We double down on our skill sets. I run the marketing and getting people in, and my partner runs the coach development and the operations. So together we’re just a driving force.” This has been a recurring theme. Honestly, I have never worked well with a partner, but a complimentary skillset can only help you. So, if you are great at metrics, ops, understanding how to make decisions, reading a P&L, and they’re great at working with people, that is a really amazing compounding effect.
Chris Cooper (10:07):
And those are actually like the two brains of your business, right? The personal skills and the business skills. And so, when this—when we asked this person like, “What did you do differently to be successful?” He said, “Nothing. It’s just taking Two-Brain’s material and running with it. The simple stuff works when it’s done consistently well.” I love it. Congratulations. And this, I think, was more of a surprise to me than it should have been. And so far, the three interviews that I’ve read you have all said the exact same thing. We do Two-Brain’s material. We avoid distractions. We stay focused. We do it over and over and over again, and that’s what gives us compounding results. Should I have been surprised? No. But I was surprised that, so far, not one has said, “We did something different.” Next, this gentleman says that their net owner benefit was expected and planned.
Chris Cooper (10:55):
He said, “We don’t do anything different. We do the simple things extremely well. Clients want a simple approach and service. We prescribe a simple approach and service, and we get great results.” He said, “We designed our own accounting system,” which is amazing. Congratulations. The key here though is that they understand their metrics that will grow the business, and they’re getting their clients great results. Again, Two-Brain Business, and they are crushing it. So proud of you. Alright, next, the last interview that we had was, “Hey, this is normal for us. It was expected and predicted. We do this kind of every month, and we’re just slowly growing.” And we said, “What do you do differently?” And he said, “Literally nothing. We just follow the Two-Brain curriculum.” Now, if you’re watching this video and you see me looking down, it’s because I’m reading the transcripts of their interviews verbatim.
Chris Cooper (11:41):
This is exactly what they said, and they said it over and over. Of the five people on our top 10 who we interviewed, every single one said, “We just followed the Two-Brain curriculum. We kept it simple. We know what we’re good at, and we just keep repeating that and repeating it and repeating that.” And so, look, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. As a mentor, I can tell you one of the best things that I can do when I’m focused on getting a client good results is figuring out what they’re great at and then reminding them to do it over and over and over again. Mentorship is not about teaching. Teaching is all about novelty. It’s all about bringing something new into the equation. And while mentors can be great teachers—if you don’t know how to do something, they’ll teach you step by step—a lot of our job is actually accountability.
Chris Cooper (12:30):
“You have to do this thing. You have to do this thing again. You have to do it a third time. You have to do it more.” Showing you how to look at your numbers is really important. Like you need to develop these skills so that you can run a great business for 30 years. You’re not going to be with your mentor for 30 years. We want you to have the skills to keep building forever. But the key is that, for a lot of us, having a mentor who just holds us accountable and says, “Keep doing the common stuff over and over and getting better and better and better,” that has a better compounding effect than any other investment we make. I have mentors who do that for me. And frankly, if she wasn’t doing it, I wouldn’t be tracking my metrics.
Chris Cooper (13:10):
I wouldn’t be doubling down on the stuff that isn’t new, and it’s not maybe as exciting as trying out Instagram reels or whatever. So, that’s the key folks. I know that when we’re talking net owner benefit, there are some critics out there who say, “Oh, they shouldn’t be talking about profits so much.” But every gym owner who has had to look carefully at their grocery bill every month, they know that money is the only thing that solves the money problems. And once you solve the money problems in your business and the money problems in your life, you can get onto working on the bigger, more important issues too. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Congratulations to all of our top NOB earners. You’re not just doing it for yourself. You’re an inspiration to everybody else.
