ROI Bonanza: The Two-Brain Summit for Gym Owners and Coaches

Podcast-1 (62)

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Hey, I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today I’m gonna talk to you about what we’re gonna be doing together in June. Our annual summit is put together to deliver to gym owners exactly what they need at the time. In the past, I’ve hosted speakers like Jocko Willink, Lisa Nichols, Seth Godin—some big names because that’s who gym owners needed. But what gym owners really need is each other. And so our theme this year at summit is Connect. We’ve got amazing speakers, and we’re focused on action. This isn’t just a big seminar where we get up and talk for two days and give you more information, especially information that we’re giving away for free. What we’re really doing is sitting you down in a room of other people who care about your success and working through problems; getting stuff done; acting on new marketing initiatives, new sales and more.

Chris Cooper (00:52):
You’re gonna hear all about it as I walk through it in this podcast. If you have questions, or if you want to talk about it at any time, just go to Gymownersunited.com. That’s where I’m answering questions to the public every single day. And that’s a caring group of over 7,000 gym owners. No question is off the table. Everybody is friendly, happy and positive. Join us in there anytime you want. So this time at Summit 2023, we’re actually gonna start with a meet-and-greet party. For the first time ever, we’re gonna host a party on Friday night. Get there early, bring your team. We’d love to meet you in person in a more social environment. I think it’s just a great opportunity for gym owners to get together and connect and make new friends, meet new people, meet people that they’ve met in years before at Summit, and just feel the energy of the community of people who want the best for them and want the best for their gym.

Chris Cooper (01:45):
Then starting on Saturday morning, we’re going to split into two stages. Every year we run an Owners Stage and a Coaches Stage. And the reason that we do that is because I would rather you get fast results from the summit, and that means putting speakers in front of your coaches and staff who will tell them exactly what to do, exactly how to grow in their careers and grow your gym without us just telling you that stuff and then you having to translate it, motivate your staff, teach them the SOPs. We’re just gonna take it right to them. So your gym is gonna be growing on the coaches side while you are growing as an entrepreneur. On the owners side this year, we’ve brought in some great guests that I’m super fired up about. So on Saturday morning on the owner’s side, I’ll kick us off.

Chris Cooper (02:30):
We’re gonna do an exercise in connection to help you make friends and make alliances with collaborators, people who want you to do better. I want you to build a community of support around yourself that is all part of the circle of trust within Two-Brain. Then what I’m gonna do is introduce Jason Khalipa. Jason’s topic this year is business virtuosity. It’s very tempting I know to wanna always be doing the next new thing, but the reality is that the best businesses over time are usually the ones who can do the common things uncommonly well over and over and over and over again. For example, some people get really good at Facebook marketing, and that gets them some new clients, and then six months later they’re back to where they started. But gyms that get really good at getting referrals can grow on that practice forever.

Chris Cooper (03:18):
The key to business virtuosity is keeping things simple, maintaining your focus and repeating the things that work over and over. Jason is going to be a very inspirational speaker and he’s gonna be talking on the owners side on Saturday morning about that precise topic. I don’t wanna give any more away because it’s so good, but “business virtuosity” is a phrase that you’re gonna be hearing a lot from us in the future. Then we’re gonna have a snack, and I’m gonna introduce Dan Martell. Now, Dan was my mentor in 2016, and he recently published a book called “Buy Back Your Time.” And around November last year, he sent me a text and said, “Hey, I got this book coming out,” and I said, “I’ll take 500 copies.” And he called me and he said, “What are you talking about? Like you’re buying 500 copies?” I said, “Yep, I just want to have them at summit to give away.”

Chris Cooper (04:06):
And he called me a month later and said, “Can I come to summit and talk about it?” So it’s my great thrill to be able to introduce all of you to Dan Martell, let him talk about his new book “Buy Back Your Time,” and maybe sign a few copies because there’s gonna be copies there. So Dan’s gonna talk about how to effectively invest your time, and it’s so great to have him at the start of summit because you’re going to be doing so many things that I want you to know how to have time to do ’em all. And I want you also to be inspired by Dan and his story. And then at that point we’re gonna break for lunch. Meanwhile, while we’re doing that, on the Coaches Stage they’re gonna be doing their own powerful work, and they’re gonna be starting with Peter Brasovan. And Peter’s gonna be talking about building powerful moments into their coaching practice.

Chris Cooper (04:52):
So owners, you know, we all know about the client journey and stuff. Peter’s gonna get your staff fired up about the client journey. He’s gonna tell them how to make memories, how to tell stories, how to set up your gym and your coaching practice to create moments in a client’s life that they will never forget and always associate with you. This is an incredibly powerful presentation. They’re going to be doing work, they’re going to be writing down parts of your client journey, they’re going to be looking for ways that they can make the experience better for your clients and actually change their lives using the power of moments. Then they’re gonna take a little break. We’ll all meet up in the lobby, get a coffee and whatever, and then they’re going to be going back into a session with Yancy Culp from Spartan DEKA.

Chris Cooper (05:38):
Now this is crazy exciting. So Yancy is the pitch man, the hype man for DEKA, and he’s gonna tell them all about DEKA challenges. He’s gonna give them some challenges. So they’re gonna be moving. He’s gonna let them experience DEKA. If you haven’t done that before, but you’ve done the workout Fight Gone Bad, you’re kind of familiar with the concept. So imagine Fight Gone Bad, but there’s like 10 stations, and you run 400 meters or a mile in between each station. That’s what DEKA is all about. And Yancy’s gonna be talking about the different DEKA options. Like there’s some where you run a mile, there’s somewhere you run 400 meters, there’s some where you don’t run at all. But he’s gonna be getting your coaches fired up and moving. And so by lunchtime your coaches will have learned about building powerful moments for your clients and about a program that they can bring into your gym that they’re gonna be really fired up about—that can make you money.

Chris Cooper (06:28):
That’s the first morning, okay? Then we’re gonna have lunch. Then on the owners side, Shawn Rider’s gonna take the stage, and he’s gonna talk about why it’s okay to talk about money, why we should be talking about money, why gym owners should be profiting and talking about wealth. I won’t give it all away, but the bottom line is that three years ago this talk would’ve been verboten. Like nobody is allowed to talk about profit or wealth, but we’ve brought the industry forward to the point where we are talking about this now and creating wealth for your family and creating impact in your town and creating legacy for your kids. And Shawn is a high-energy speaker who has done exactly all this stuff, and he’s gonna be presenting that to you—and also how you can create wealth for your team.

Chris Cooper (07:14):
This is an amazing, amazing presentation, and it’s not just a bunch of spreadsheets and financial talk. It’s a motivational talk on why you should become wealthy, and Shawn is exactly the guy to do this. Then we’re gonna take a quick break, and then Karl Solberg is gonna talk to us about connecting the goals with the players. So Karl has cracked the code on taking his mission and vision and getting his staff to align with it and act on it. They have two gyms in Sweden, he and his partner Oskar, and they’re going to actually tell you how you do this. So for years and years and years you could read books about leadership, mission, vision, and that’s all cool, and maybe you could get it out of your head, and maybe you could get it down on paper, but getting your staff to buy in on it and even more to act on it to make decisions based on your mission, that’s the missing link.

Chris Cooper (08:05):
And Carl and Oskar have solved this. They’re living this out every day at CrossFit Medis, and they’re gonna be able to teach it to you. He’s gonna give you an exercise to help you get this going step by step. Look, this is gonna add rocket fuel to your team. If everybody’s moving in the same direction and moving faster, you’re gonna grow way faster with more energy and excitement, and you’ll come to love your gym again, and so will they. Then after a quick break, John Franklin will take the stage, and he’s gonna give you the Broke Gym Owner’s Guide to Marketing. So John is a very sought-after speaker. He’s very entertaining. He’s like your favorite college roommate, but he’s also a genius, and what he’s gonna give you is a tactical plan to get marketing even if you’re broke.

Chris Cooper (08:48):
So this is all marketing that you can do for no money. John is the former owner of four gyms. He’s the chief marketing officer for Two-Brain. He’s a very passionate, energetic speaker. He’s hilarious. And what we wanna do is give you some tactical stuff that you can take away and start working. So at this presentation, you’re actually gonna start doing some marketing that will help grow your gym and keep it growing after the summit’s over. While that’s happening, your coaches will be getting even more fun and great speakers. So first Colm O’Reilly is gonna tell them how to get clients to listen. You and I both know that one of the most frustrating parts of this career is feeling like you’ve got all this knowledge and passion and expertise, and you’re saying it to your clients and they’re not listening. Sometimes they’re literally not listening—like they’re talking to their buddy as you’re telling them about the workout. Colm is gonna help you solve that problem.

Chris Cooper (09:41):
He’s gonna teach your coaches how to solve it. You don’t have to learn it. You don’t have to teach it to them. Colm’s gonna just do that for you. It’s called getting Clients to Listen, and this will also help with adherence and retention. Get your clients to get more value out of your gym, stick around longer and get better results and outcomes in healthspan and lifespan. Very important topic. After that, they’re gonna have a quick break, and then they’re going to do a session on having hard conversations with Brian Strump. So imagine as an owner, the hardest part about owning any business is the people. It’s having conversations with your staff and also with your clients, right? And also your friends and your family. And sometimes these conversations are fun and exciting, but sometimes they’re really hard. Like how do you deal with a bad review?

Chris Cooper (10:28):
How do you deal with a client that you’re gonna fire? How do you talk to a client about raising rates? How do you talk to a staff person who’s underperforming? How do you talk to a staff person about meeting their career goals? Brian is an expert at this. His gym, Steele Creek, is one of the best in the world for staffing. He doesn’t really work there too much. His staff grows the business. They handle all these hard conversations for him. So imagine like the brainpower, the focus, the energy, the attention span you would get back if your staff knew how to handle these hard conversations for you. That’s what Brian is gonna do. They’re gonna role-play, they’re gonna have a lot of fun, but they are gonna take a massive weight off your shoulders by learning these skills. Then Jeff and Mikki Martin are gonna come on stage, and they’re gonna talk about the essentials of coaching kids and building a youth program.

Chris Cooper (11:17):
Now, we should all have this. People will pay three times as much for their kids to exercise as they will for themselves, but, more importantly, this is how we affect the next generation. This is the legacy that we’re leaving behind: one of fitness and health. Jeff and Mikki are very passionate about it. They’ve been doing this for two decades. They know how to get it done. But it’s more important that your coaches know how to build a successful kids program that creates opportunities for themselves and outcomes for your clients than it is for you to know because they’re gonna be the implementers. So instead of lecturing to you on how to do this, Jeff and Mikki are gonna take your coaches through the process step by step. And when they leave, they will know exactly how to kick off and build a kid’s program in your gym.

Chris Cooper (12:00):
That’s all on Saturday. You’re going to be tired, but you’re gonna want to go out for dinner, relax in the Rosemont area. Some of our sponsors are hosting get-togethers off site. You’ll know about those in advance. You can show up for those. You can relax, you can unwind, have a couple of drinks if you want to meet up with other gym owners, meet some old friends. Rosemont’s just an amazing area. It’s less than a block from our venue. You can just walk over and enjoy a beautiful summer evening. That’s what we tend to do every year: just unwind. Let the lessons sink in. You can regroup with your staff, keep them fired up. Now we’re gonna have workouts on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Jason Khalipa is gonna lead the workouts. You and your coaches should sign up. I’m gonna give you the registration links after you register for the summit, but this is your chance to watch Jason doing the stuff that he’s preaching and teaching your coaches. On Sunday, he is going to be kicking things off on the Coaches Stage, but you can register for his workouts—big groups, lots of fun, minimal equipment. You can register for his stuff when you sign up for summit.

Chris Cooper (13:08):
So on Sunday Day 2 of Summit, we’re gonna focus even more on getting you amazing ROI on this. I want you to be able to leave Summit and have so many ideas that you can’t wait to act on them. You’re fired up and excited to own a gym again. So on the Owners Stage, Joleen Bingham is gonna give you a talk on how to unlock your team’s potential. She wants you to create a staff journey to hire, develop and retain your best team. So imagine if 10 years from now your best team, the people that you loved working with, were still with you and the worst ones were gone. That’s what Joleen has mastered here. This is a topic that has never been broken down this way before at my summits or any other summits. Joleen has built this staff journey, and she’s gonna give it to you.

Chris Cooper (13:53):
You’re gonna walk through it. You’re gonna build this for yourself right on the spot. It’s an amazing opportunity for you to secure your gym for the future and to create opportunities for your coaches to make their dream careers, too. Then we’ll take a snack, and then Andrea Savard’s gonna come on stage and talk about legendary service and leadership. You and I have probably read a hundred books on leadership, right? And you usually take away one good idea, a couple of good stories, but it’s very tough to put those lessons into practice. It’s tough to know like “okay, how do I handle this” or “what do I say when they say that?” That’s what Andrea’s speech is. I saw the precursor version of this at Tinker meeting a month ago in Nashville, and it was incredible. People were leaving there with little, tiny notebooks of exactly what to say when this happens, exactly how to behave when this happens, how to stop this from happening in advance.

Chris Cooper (14:46):
This is a watershed presentation on leadership. It’s more tactical than any I’ve ever seen in my life. You are going to love it. And while she is doing that, over on the Coaches Stage, Jason Khalipa is gonna kick them off by talking about taking their coaching from a seven to a 10. You know, when I founded Two-Brain Business, I considered myself to be like, well, I probably thought I was a 10-outta-10 coach, but really I was a seven or an eight, and I thought “that’s gonna be enough to build a great gym, a great career as a gym owner.” But the reality was that while my coaching was good, it wasn’t perfect, and I was really limited by my gym ops. Like I was an eight-outta-10 coach running a two-outta-10 gym, and that’s why I wasn’t making a living.

Chris Cooper (15:33):
And so we founded Two-Brain to help gym owners build a 10-outta-10 gym. And what’s happened now is that a lot of gym owners have excellent ops, excellent systems—especially if you’re already in the Two-Brain mentorship practice. You’ve got a great gym, and now it’s time to take the coaches from a seven to a 10, and Jason’s gonna tell ’em how to do that in the way that only Jason Khalipa can. Your coaches are gonna come out of this fired up. They’re gonna come out of it better. They’re gonna come out of it ready to help you take your business to the next level. They’re gonna come out of it as 10s, and you are going to get a system to help train them to get better and better and better. My staff at Catalyst has been doing this now for a couple months, and I’ll tell you the passion is back, baby.

Chris Cooper (16:15):
The energy is back. The groups are full again—groups are excited, they’re fun. It feels like OG kind of CrossFit when everybody was just passionate about being there, happy and friendly. The community feeling is back, and that’s what Jason’s teaching. He’s been working on this for years, but he’s never been able to deliver this in a public way as refined and focused as he is right now. We’re gonna be the first to ever offer this—it’s amazing. After that, we’re gonna have a break, and then Anastasia Bennett’s gonna come on, and she’s really gonna cue up success for a nutrition-coaching program. So her topic is Creating an Avatar of the Perfect Nutrition Client. Here’s the problem. Over 75% of microgyms have a nutrition-coaching program right now, but on average they’re only making 6% of their revenue at best. It’s mostly like 4% of their revenue from nutrition coaching.

Chris Cooper (17:07):
And if you’re only doing that little, you’re probably underwater. You’re probably not getting a good ROI on your nutrition-coaching program. You’re probably not paying a person enough to make it worthwhile to even be a nutrition coach, right? You might even be losing money if you’re paying for ongoing nutrition mentoring or whatever or insurance or certifications. Anastasia’s gonna teach you how to identify the clients who want and need nutrition coaching, how to apply it to them and how to actually sell it. Look, years ago she started doing nutrition coaching. She had two gyms, and she was making more money herself doing nutrition coaching that she actually just moved out of her gyms. And this is all she does now. She’s gonna really unlock this for your gym, and she’s gonna set your coaches up for the next speaker, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

Chris Cooper (17:53):
So then we’re all gonna have lunch. That’s Sunday. Okay? Then on the Owners Stage, I’m gonna bring up my friend and my coach Bonnie Skinner. Bonnie’s a registered psychotherapist. She’s like the therapist in residence here at Two-Brain HQ. She and I get together every second week to talk about confidence and roadblocks. She’s the reason that Two-Brain just keeps growing and I’ve gotten over mindset problems that were limiting our growth. Bonnie is amazing. She’s a frequent speaker at Tinker events, and we’re gonna bring her onstage to help you identify what’s stopping you from growing and work through that stuff. In this one session, she’s gonna give you tools to do it on your own. There’s a reason that over half of the Tinkers work one on one with Bonnie, and it’s because the biggest obstacle to your growth is often you.

Chris Cooper (18:41):
She’s gonna help you get over that at summit this year. Then we’re gonna have a break, and we’re gonna come back with another amazing, tactical presentation. Karen Hazelton is gonna talk about doing a stress-free goal review. So when things started out, I was teaching goal reviews because we were doing it in our personal-training practice, and I taught it to a few gyms back in 2012, 2013, and some of those gyms were doing it consistently, and they did it a little bit better than I did. So that was cool. We adopted what they did, and then the next generation of gym owners to learn goal reviews took it, and a couple of them did it even better. They changed a couple of things or added client tracking or whatever. They added a tool or they took away a barrier or they changed a question, and so we adopted that practice.

Chris Cooper (19:25):
And so now this thing has been refined over and over and over for a decade, and Karen Hazelton has the best version we’ve ever offered. And, even better, she can teach you how to do goal reviews with all of your clients every quarter, just like she does in a big gym, in a stress-free method. This is amazing. I’m adopting this at my gym now. Even the original is getting updated, and Karen is gonna teach it to you, and you’re can actually work through it. Then, while that’s happening, on the Coaches Stage Cynthia Fotti is gonna give your staff the recipe for delivering habits-based nutrition coaching—the step-by-step playbook, how to get clients, how to charge for it, what to actually deliver. This is so valuable that any of your coaches can learn it and start delivering nutrition or habits-based coaching right after Summit.

Chris Cooper (20:15):
This is definitely enough for them to make at least half of a meaningful career income. But the next speaker, Brian Bott, is gonna give them everything else that they need. So he’s gonna come in and talk about building a semi-private training program. This is mind blowing for those of us who were personal trainers in the past and also for those of us who have just run group-training facilities. Semi-private training bridges the gap between the two. So when I was doing personal training, my book was absolutely full. Sometimes I was training 12 people a day and only making about 40 grand a year, and then I jumped to group training, and now I was seeing like 40 people a day and making even less money. Semi-private is when you and two or three other people are training at the same time but following different programs—training with a coach but sharing that coach with three or four other people.

Chris Cooper (21:07):
So imagine you’re doing a session with three of your best friends. They’re training for different things, but you’re all training together. You’ve got a coach who’s giving you a spot, giving you a cue, correction, inspiring and motivating, pushing you, and you’re all doing that together. Well, that to a lot of people is more valuable than group training. It’s less expensive for them than doing personal training. It’s way more fun. The coach can make way more money, the gym can collect way more revenue, and the retention is way higher. Brian’s ARM every month is like over 300 bucks per client. He’s got two gyms. They’re crushing it out in Jersey, and he’s gonna give you the recipe to do it. Look, if you bring your coaches to the summit and they show up at noon on Sunday and they just sit through Cynthia and Brian’s presentations, they’ll have the knowledge and skills and tools to make a career in fitness.

Chris Cooper (21:58):
Like this is an amazing gift and an amazing investment that you can make in them, but their growth will grow the pie for everybody, and that’s the point of really creating these careers for your coaches. They’re not taking from you. They’re not taking a bigger slice of your pie. What they’re doing is taking your platform, building opportunities for themselves and growing the pie for everybody as they do it. That’s what we teach at Two-Brain, and these speakers are set up to deliver exactly that for you. At the end of Sunday, we’re all gonna come back together in one room and Taryn Dubreuil is gonna talk about how to zero in your focus and get stuff done. Taryn took her kind of disorganized, popular but stressful gym and turned it into an amazing culture-focused, client-centric gym that generates a ton more revenue. I think she like three-X’d in revenue in two and a half years now.

Chris Cooper (22:55):
She’s a millionaire, and the reason is that she’s able to just focus in on what works. So all the way back to business virtuosity and all these other things that we’re gonna teach you, Taryn’s superpower is just being able to focus on each thing, get them done so that her gym grows, and she’s gonna teach you how to do it too. Look, I know you’re overwhelmed with ideas. I know you’re busy. You owe it to yourself to take two or three days, come to Chicago, get your passion back for owning a gym. Get a clear path to success, meet other people who love you and support you and want you to do well, and learn from the experts, and do the actual work. Bring your staff. You’ll get closer for it. A lot of the top-earning gyms in Two-Brain, like they bring their staff, and they say that their growth was so rapid because they brought their staff. They aligned their staff, they energized their staff, they told their staff what to do so that they didn’t have to learn everything and then try to delegate it down. More than anything else, I just wanna meet you in person. I hope you can make it to Summit 2023. The ticket links are below and we’ll see you in Chicago.

Thanks for listening!

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Did you know gym owners can earn $100,000 a year with no more than 150 clients? We wrote a guide showing you exactly how.