Your business is set up to achieve—something. What is it?
You spend all of your time and energy working toward that goal. All of your systems, your hires, your prices: they’re all built by working backward from that goal, right?
Or maybe not. Maybe you don’t have a clear goal. Maybe you copy ideas from Facebook groups, hire people just like you and spend money as you make it. Maybe you just kinda take business as it comes.
As a professional coach, you’d never allow your clients to follow this path.
You’d start with their goals and work backward to achieve them. You’d test their progress and change their workouts, their diets and their habits. You’d always seek ways to improve their results.
In other words, you’d optimize their plan for success.
Optimization Is Focus
If your client is a baseball player, you’d optimize their workouts and diet for baseball performance. If they want to lose weight, you’d optimize their plan for weight loss. If they need to strengthen their back, you’d optimize their plan for strength.
Optimization means focus: having a clear goal and doing only the things that support that goal.
So what are you optimizing your business for?
Is it headcount?
Is it ARM?
Is it “community?”
Is it size?
Is it Games appearances by your athletes?
Is it nothing? Are you kinda chasing all of those things?
Optimization by Stage
Is your focus vague? If so, let’s fix your business by clarifying your focus. Here’s what we recommend:
Founder Phase: Optimize for Revenue—Get to breakeven, whatever it takes. Work long hours, bootstrap, leverage your personal connections to get clients. But build the systems that will let you get out of Founder Phase as soon as possible, because Founder Phase is hard on your health and family. And make sure you’re actually optimizing for revenue, not headcount: if you try to just sell a bunch of cheap memberships to get more people in the door, you’ll never make it out of this phase. Trust me!
Farmer Phase: Optimize for Profit—Control your costs, attract more of the best clients, give your staff opportunities to grow on the platform you’ve built. This is where the majority of gyms in our Growth Stage find massive success. We recommend the Profit First system; but first, you must optimize your systems, expenses and payroll.
Tinker Phase: Optimize for Wealth—Wealth means freedom of time and resources. Wealth does NOT mean greed or hoarding. In Tinker Phase, you should focus more on what you earn for the time you spend, and then you focus on what to do with the surplus of each of those. You might find that you have to optimize YOURSELF first: as a leader, as a mentor, and as an entrepreneur.
Thief Phase: Optimize for legacy—Pivot your wealth to help others.
There are over 800 gym owners in the Two-Brain family. Most are in Farmer phase, around 20 percent are in Founder Phase, and 5 percent are in Tinker Phase. They’re all zooming upward.
And what keeps them moving forward is their focus: they’re busy optimizing for their goal instead of trying to expand/get clients/win the Games/design the best T-shirts/post the most comments on affiliate Facebook groups. That’s what mentorship does: it helps you optimize for the right things.
Your family can’t eat CrossFit Games T-shirts.
Which stage of entrepreneurship are you in? Take our 20-question quiz to find out and get the exact steps you need to take your business to the next level.
