Chris Cooper (00:02):
Which gyms do the most revenue per month? I’m Chris Cooper, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And this is the leaderboard show—my favorite show of the whole month because I get to talk about the gyms who are doing the best in one of six different categories that we track religiously. This month, I’m talking about the gyms in Two-Brain who are doing the most revenue. Now, this is a big, sexy metric that a lot of people want to talk about, right? The revenue number is like the bench press of the Globo Gym. Everybody wants to know what’s your bench. Well, today, we’re going to talk about the proven numbers and how these gym owners got there because not only are these gyms absolutely crushing it in revenue, but they are owned by generous people who want to share their top tactics with you. And a lot of this stuff is things maybe you’ve never thought of before.
Chris Cooper (00:49):
So first, let’s go into the list, and let’s talk about who is in the top 10 this month. So first, in 10th place, and this is all in American dollars, USD. We have gyms around the world that you’re going to hear about who are represented here, but we transfer everything in USD so that you’re comparing apples to apples, okay? So first off, a gym from the U.S. in 10th place is doing $49,487 per month. Now look, guys, I’ve got to tell you something else here. This is not just like they had their biggest month of their life, and that’s it. We actually look at their previous month. So we want a rolling three-month average because what can happen—and a lot of gurus actually do this to fool you—is they’ll sell like one massive six-week challenge or something, or they’ll store up all their dividends for the whole year, and they’ll take it in one month and then report that as like, “Here’s how much money I did last month.”
Chris Cooper (01:43):
And we’re supposed to think like, “Oh, that’s what they do every month,” right? And then they’ll even sometimes do worse. They’ll multiply that by 12, and say like, “We have projected this much in earnings.” That’s all BS. You and I know it. This is like their rolling three-month average revenue. And we looked at it in September of 2023, and we said, “Okay, we want to share who’s doing the most, and how are they doing it?” We’re all about objective proof here. So, first gym: $49,487 last month. They’re in the States, and if I were them, I would not be sleeping well because 513 more dollars would put them to a $50,000 monthly average in revenue. Good for them. Congratulations. They know what their next step is going to be. Right. Next, in ninth place is a CrossFit gym, and they did $50,277 in revenue last month. So awesome—great top line guys. And I want to dig in. I want to see what that bottom line is, but like 50,000 bucks—crossing that threshold feels amazing. I remember the first time we did it; we jumped from like 46 to 52 for the first time ever. And I was just over the moon. Like I could not believe that a micro-gym could do that much money. And I felt great because I knew what my profit margin was.
Chris Cooper (03:00):
And at that point it was like over 50%. I knew that my coaches were able to make a great amount of money. That’s like a watershed moment for a lot of gyms. So, congratulations. Like you’ve proven that your business is viable, and you’ve got something to be proud of. Keep going; keep doing the things that you’re already doing. Up next: These guys are from Chile. I love them so much. In U.S. dollars, last month, they did $51,403 in revenue. So awesome. You’re really making a difference by serving so many people in that country. And you know, the CrossFit affiliates out there should really be proud of you too, like I am. In seventh place, from Germany, $51,662 U.S. from last month. And man, there’s some great tips from this gym that I think are going to be new to a lot of listeners.
Chris Cooper (03:48):
So stay tuned for those. Sixth place: This gym is on our leaderboard and has been for years and years and years, and they just keep crushing it. $53,274 in revenue last month, like rolling three average. So great. I know that like these are full-time career staff working at this gym. Full-time, career owner, longtime CrossFit affiliate. He loves to get other CrossFit affiliates together in his neck of the woods too. I’ve even hosted seminars at this gym and I just—I love it. This is really like proof of the longevity that you can have when you have the right systems and the right people working those systems, charging the right rates, bringing people in, and keeping people around long term and actually changing their lives. So, thanks for that. Thanks for your leadership. The next one is actually a CrossFit gym too. And so, this gym narrowly beat out the previous gym at $53,502.
Chris Cooper (04:44):
Beat them by under 250 bucks, like 227—$8. These guys are both in Tinker. I know there’s going to be a little rivalry now. I love it so much. And both of these guys will probably come back next time. We report revenue numbers publicly with even higher numbers because that’s what Tinker’s all about, right? Helping each other climb that ladder. So, congratulations to them. Now, those were the top performing CrossFit gyms. So, there’s still four more to go, but in number five: 53,502. And number six: 53,274. Amazing. Now, let’s keep going up. In fourth place is a gym from Belgium; they did $58,156 USD in revenue. This next gym is in Denmark and in U.S. dollars, last month, they did $62,434. Congratulations. You know, it’s not a CrossFit gym, but as the movement of constantly-varied, functional movement grows worldwide, I love to see European countries on the leaderboard; I love to see Asian countries on the leaderboard.
Chris Cooper (05:41):
This is so great. And the best part is these are all Two-Brain gyms. So, you know, it’s not just like they got a big bench press, but they can’t walk up the stairs. These guys have good revenue, and they also have great profits. They have great retention, they have very high ARM, and most importantly, they’re changing all these people’s lives. So, guys, thank you for your service. Congratulations, Denmark. But I’m so excited to get to number two because it’s from Canada, a Canadian box: $62,435. That’s U.S. dollars last month, which is, you know, probably around 90 grand Canadian. Congratulations. This is more of a sports performance training type gym, and they’re absolutely crushing it, changing lives out there and doing really, really well in a Canadian economy that I know is tough. Just, you know, for background, like 65% of the gyms in Canada have not recovered even 90% of their revenue post-COVID.
Chris Cooper (06:37):
And here these guys are close to the top of our leaderboard and crushing it. Congratulations. The number one gym that we want to report on is also a sports-specific gym. They did, over the last three months, average per month of $93,516 U.S. So, congratulations. These guys are down in a southern state. They’ve got some great tips for you that I’m going to share right now on how to get to that level. And these tips are going to be brand new to a lot of you. You know, every month I talk about revenue, and I talk about like the math of ARM times client head count. And like these gyms who are out there with 500 clients still might not have great revenue because their average revenue per member sucks. They might not have great retention. This gym is all of that. They have the complete package. They have high ARM; they have a ton of clients.
Chris Cooper (07:25):
They have really amazing retention, right? And they’re a sports-performance gym. So, let’s get into the comments from some of our top performers. Some of these people have been on these leaderboards for years. Some of these people are brand new to the leaderboards. Congratulations to all of them. Congratulations to everybody who’s just out there grinding. You know, they’re at the base of the mountain, but they’re climbing. They’re in our RampUp program, or they’re partway up the mountain, and they can see the summit. You know, they’re in growth, and or maybe they’re like charting new mountains in Tinker. Congratulations to every single gym owner listening to this right now. Like, if you’ve got one client, you are changing a life, and you’re making a difference out there. Thank you. So, we ask these people, what did you do to reach this level? And all these people, like the best entrepreneurs in the world, are crazy generous with their time and their advice.
Chris Cooper (08:10):
They just want to help everybody else. So, here’s what they told me. This is a funny one. So, this guy was midway on the leaderboard: “Hey, what did you do to get to this level?” He says, “Nothing exciting.” And what he means by that is nothing novel. He is very, very good at doing the consistent—consistently the work that matters. I called my former members; I reactivated my past members. I sent two emails minimum per week to everybody on my list. I kept my Google “My Business” page up to date with my address, my phone, and new photos, and I have a new coach coming on. That’s my bottleneck right now. I can’t onboard more people because I don’t have enough coaches, so we’re onboarding a new coach. Nothing in what he just shared is like, “Oh dude; we tripled our ad spend in TikTok,” right?
Chris Cooper (09:00):
It’s, “I did the common things uncommonly well.” The reason I love talking about this gym is they’re so good at business that we would even call that virtuosity, right? They do the common uncommonly well; they do the boring work. They do better and better at the basics all the time. That’s why I’m so proud of them. “Nothing exciting,” he says. Right? What he means is nothing new. He’s working the system and doing it well. So, here’s somebody who is doing some stuff that’s different from other people. And so, this program is a sports-performance program. What he’s doing is he’s brought in like a CSM-type role who manages groups of 100. And so, instead of having one person in charge of the client journey and calling people when they’re sick, he says, “These are your 100. Make sure that they show up, make sure that they stay engaged, make sure they get a birthday card, make sure that they’re making progress,” et cetera.
Chris Cooper (09:54):
Very interesting. And that level kind of sits above coach to take care of the clients, okay? They’re also—so they’re like the direct line of contact for the clients, but that also means that the general manager of this gym, or the owner, only has to talk to a couple of CSMs to hear like how people are doing. Okay? He says, “We’ve also removed our discounts.” Yep, that’s a big deal. Now, he focused heavily on his ARM to get that number up, okay? So, he didn’t go on crazy marketing to boost his revenue, and instead he spent the last quarter focusing on his ARM. And now what he said is that he noticed that his big groups were more profitable and so more desirable for his coaches. And so, what he did with his one-on-one was he started shifting them to semi-private so that the coaches could still make lots of money per hour.
Chris Cooper (10:43):
And he said that coaches can now make about $150 an hour in semi-private, or they can make something, you know, around 100 coaching big groups too. Okay? Another thing that he does too is he really went all in on what he calls spirit wear, which is like apparel. So instead of ordering, you know, from like, an external provider and taking a small margin, he actually bought a heat transfer machine. He was doing so much apparel, and one of his staff runs this, basically, and it’s absolutely bananas what he’s making now. He does get this $500,000 a year in revenue from apparel that’s branded apparel from his sports-specific gym. Okay? So, keep that in mind; that’s incredible. And by doing the work himself with like—you know, it’s not a highly paid labor job to do that. You just have to be consistent and produce this stuff.
Chris Cooper (11:37):
He’s making a really great margin on that—better than you would on your own. I do a different tactic with retail. I don’t want to be designing stuff; I don’t want to be printing it. I would rather take the smaller margin and just have somebody else worry about all that junk for me. But this guy at this level, at this scale, with this many clients, he says, “Nope, it’s worth it for me to do it in-house.” And he does. The next person says—this person really, really wants to be anonymous. But they did share some top tips. And what they said is that they’ve really added a gigantic competition, and that really helps them out too. So, what they’ve asked for is sponsors to donate $2,000, and if they did that, they got on the banners, they got on the t-shirts, et cetera.
Chris Cooper (12:19):
They’ve got like 150 people competing in this competition. Suffice to say, we’ve talked about running big competitions before, and we can link to that. I really want to protect this person’s privacy. They’re going through some stuff right now. They were very generous to share this with us, and we thank them. Next, this gentleman who runs this gym says that they are using a 10-week program that they call Ready to Change. This person charges 450 euros for this, so a little bit more in USD. It’s a 10-week program. It gets people jumpstarted into their gym, it onboards them, and then they work on converting them to ongoing memberships. What’s really interesting here is we see this trend continuing where these were very popular in the States—2018, right? When Facebook ads were really cheap in the States, you would see these kinds of challenges.
Chris Cooper (13:09):
But the bottom line here is like on Facebook, the term challenge is still the top performing ad you can run, right? A lot of people got away from it because the gym owner themselves, they were bored with it or they, or they did it one way that didn’t feel good, and so they stopped using the challenge on Facebook at all. But you can still use it, you can do it in a good way. And that’s what this gym is doing. They’re charging 450 euros for a 10-week Ready to Change program. They learn about mindset, nutrition, and all the other fitness streams that they charge money for—personal training, group training—and then they convert them into ongoing memberships, and it’s been really, really good for them. So, I said you see these trends happening. CrossFit is growing, especially moving into like eastern and southern Europe, moving into Asia.
Chris Cooper (13:55):
You know, this kind of thing is happening. And, while it seems like the trends are maybe five years behind the U.S., some of the stuff that worked in the U.S. really, really well five years ago is working in eastern Europe, is working even in western Europe, and is still working in the U.S. if you tweak it a little bit and do it a little bit differently. And, you can be proud to run it; it doesn’t feel like the slimy tactic that maybe was run five years ago, okay? To us, this gym says the biggest difference to us for our revenue was the No Sweat Intro process. We’re doing better at it; we’re improving it all the time, but it’s making a difference with how people proceed in our company. When we used free trials, we had a lot of people come in, they would try it, they would sign up, but they would drop off, and so our LEG went downhill, and that dramatically affected our revenue.
Chris Cooper (14:39):
He says, “I had a No Sweat Intro this morning, and right away, he signed for the PT On-Ramp option. And it’s one reason that we were adding more new members and also more revenue. You get that personal touch right from the start.” This is still his words. And also, they call every lead within two hours of their booking. “They’re always say that they’re impressed when we call them back right away. They say that they’re very delighted that it’s so professional. And we also do roleplay with our team on NSI.” So, they really credit the NSI. Hey, I’ve got to tell you this story. So earlier this month, I shared a podcast about the comeback of my gym, Catalyst. And the one role that I’m still sitting in about half the time is sales.
Chris Cooper (15:20):
I do a lot of the NSIs—maybe half of them. And I had a gentleman join my gym. I love this guy from first sight. He used to do CrossFit in the Philippines, okay? And uh, so we book him for a No Sweat Intro. He’s moved to Canada now. He’s working here—booked him for this No Sweat Intro. We talked to him back and forth through GLM, doing our lead nurture with him. So, I feel like I know him a little bit already. He comes in, he says, “Yeah, you know, I did CrossFit in the Philippines about a year ago, really liked it, but obviously I moved to Canada, so I stopped.” And so, I said, “Okay, well great; let’s talk about your goals.” And then I put him on the InBody, and I measured. You know, “Where are we going? What do we want to do?”
Chris Cooper (15:58):
And he’s like, “I really like the groups. Fantastic. Let’s start with our On-Ramp program. Here’s the price.” “Okay, well, how much are groups going to cost me when I get to that point?” I tell him the price, and he says, “Wow, you know, I’ve got to tell you: CrossFit costs twice as much here as I was paying in the Philippines. But they never asked me about my goals. They never put me on this scale that tells me about my body fat and gives me this printout. They never told me what was best for me.” He’s like, “Now, I get it. This is the real experience, but I don’t want to tell you the name of that other gym because this is obviously how it’s supposed to be done, and I don’t want them to get into trouble.” Well, I had kind of a laugh because, you know, out of all the Two-Brain gyms in the world, we’ve worked with 1,500 to 2,000 of them—more than anybody else.
Chris Cooper (16:45):
And those gyms are offering No Sweat Intros, but there are 10,000 other CrossFit gyms who aren’t. And so, it’s amazing to hear from somebody who’s experienced both sides that he feels this is the right way to do it. I love that so much. Okay, back to the leaderboard. So, this gym, they said, “Actually this is our lowest revenue in several months for a couple of reasons, but we’re still proud to make the leaderboard anyway. We usually do even better.” And they said that they improve their revenues by improving their ARM. And they do that with specialty seminars. “Last month, we started a 12-week, twice-a-week Olympic seminar at $240 per month. And we had 12 people commit to the three months. So, $720 for that Olympic lifting program.” Great job guys. “We have one going on almost all the time. We decide on the seminars based on the goal reviews.” So, they run these goal reviews with their clients every three or six months. They look at like, “Here’s the total of the feedback that people are giving us. Oh, people want more Olympic lifting. Wonderful. We can change our programming, or we can offer this specialty program.”
Chris Cooper (17:50):
“We know that there are 12 to 20 people who want this, and we want to be able to do an amazing job with it—not just add another class to the schedule and throw another coach in and teach the exact same stuff. We want to do a great job. We’re going to charge something that’s valuable and bring the value—720 bucks for three months of it. It’s twice a week for 12 weeks.” And boom, their ARM is way up, and they use rolling seminars, so they overlap a little bit. That keeps their ARM high, and that puts them on our revenue leaderboard. So, congratulations, everybody. Like if you’re a gym owner, and you’re not making $50,000 a month, you deserve to be doing $50,000 a month in revenue. You are out there providing a service to your community that nobody else is. You are saving lives; you’re saving your clients money—like it costs a hundred thousand dollars to have a heart attack right now. You deserve to be successful.
Chris Cooper (18:40):
Revenue is one of the metrics that we use to track that success. I’m really proud of everybody who is out there being successful, providing value and getting value in return. Hey, if you want to chat about this or get our free guides to help you with some of this stuff, just go to gymownersunited.com. It’s a free group. I try to get in there about once a day and answer questions, but we’re always in there sharing guides, answering questions, commenting on posts, and there are 8,000 other gyms in there helping each other grow too. I’m Chris Cooper, this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Thank you for your service, and congratulations to everybody on the revenue leaderboard this month.
