We have been evolving as a species for thousands of years. Every generation has worked hard to increase their healthspan and wealth. We’ve come a long way, but now things are going backward.
For the first time in history, human lifespan is shortening. We have access to food, technology and science like never before, but we face new challenges of abundance, consumption and inactivity.
For the first time, we have to make time to be physically active. For the first time, we have to make choices about the food we eat or we will die younger, sicker and sadder than our parents did.
The sole bastion against this reversal of evolution: gym owners and trainers.
And there should be enough of us. Every single year, 10,000 people join our army that’s marching against the evil of wasted potential and shortened lifespan.
But we have a problem: Every year, 9,000 of us quit. Our ranks are not growing quickly enough to turn the tide.
Two-Brain stands at the forefront of this battle.
The Noble Mission and Our Challenges
Why do we become trainers and coaches? The simple answer is that we want to help others.
But the more complicated answer is that many of us have had our own health and fitness transformations. Many of us have seen depression, obesity and sickness reversed by the pursuit of fitness and health, and we want nothing more than to share that knowledge, joy and well-being with others.
We give up meaningful careers. We turn our backs on potentially lucrative jobs in the name of service. We just want to help others.
So why do so many of us quit?
We never quit because we lose our passion for service. We never quit because we’re tired and exhausted. We never quit because the work is too hard.
We quit because we run out of money.
Those other things can happen, too. We can get burned out, we can get depressed, we can get exhausted, and we can risk our marriages, our income, our homes. We can bear all of that. But all those things happen because we run out of money.
Sometimes we just run out of time. We start fixing our gym and things are looking a little better. Then, unfortunately, our gym is still fragile enough to suffer from one major setback: The landlord raises the rent, 10 clients leave, one of our key staff members opens their own gym, and we’re done. That’s it.
Our businesses are fragile enough to be wiped out in one fell swoop. The government makes a new law that nobody expected. We’re done. We’re out of business.
Ten or 20 years of serving people, expanding their health, keeping them out of the hospital, keeping them working, keeping them paying taxes, and then the power bill goes up, and we’re done.
The gym business and the fitness business are fragile. But coaching isn’t a new idea. People have been helping others get healthy, get fit, eat better and exercise for 100 years. There is no reason for this industry to still be so immature.
By immature, I don’t mean dumb. I mean that we have not learned the lessons required to make meaningful careers yet. For decades, we didn’t know exactly how to run profitable gyms.
The reason we didn’t have these lessons, this knowledge, is that nobody was gathering it. Nobody was creating a body of knowledge and applying the filters of proof to all the claims in our industry. Nobody was collecting data to say, “Here’s what works, and here’s what doesn’t, and here’s straight-up bullshit, and here’s how you spot a liar in our midst.”
Nobody was out there doing that until now.
The Solution: Data
The thing that makes our gyms antifragile, that helps us grow in the toughest industry in the world, is data. The foundation of all our decisions must be rooted in data or we will always have fragile gyms.
Now, it’s tough to gather data if you’re a single gym owner, working your tail off 14 hours a day, all by yourself, living on this fitness island, largely disconnected from other gym owners, largely disconnected from the overwhelming body of knowledge. You can be as scientific as you want. I tried this and struggled.
But here’s the problem: Every time you change one little thing in your business, you are taking a risk. If people don’t like the change, they’ll use it as an excuse to give up on their pursuit of fitness.
If your prices go up because your family is starving, people will quit and give up on their journey of fitness. If you buy a new car, people will think they are being charged unfairly and give up on their pursuit of fitness. If you run a Facebook campaign that adds new members, you might celebrate for a day and then regret it for a year because all your current members quit.
And when you do something that pisses off your current members, they will go out smoking. They will make it feel like the worst breakup of your life.
And yet, if you don’t do these experiments, you’ll never grow, you’ll never know what works, you’ll never advance the gym, and you’ll never make a better living for yourself and your family.
You’re caught.
How do you avoid the pain of doing science, of turning your gym into a petri dish and doing experiment after experiment?
You leverage the community of gym owners. You connect with other gym owners who are doing science, who are running their own experiments, who are collecting data and saying, “Here’s what actually works, and here’s what doesn’t work, and here’s the proof.”
We Are Stronger Together
There has never been a unifying force in our field. Other fields have governing bodies. They have agencies, licensing, regulatory commissions, associations, science, data. They share the science of their practitioners’ growth.
Why do you think scientists are in high demand? Why do you think doctors make more than fitness coaches? It’s because they’ve been doing the science for the last 2,000 years. They’ve been running experiments, and they know what works to change health care.
Why do you think surgeons charge more than doctors? Not because their work is more valuable but because it’s more urgent, and it works. They save lives. And they save lives because of science. They’re no longer bloodletting, attaching leeches, or talking about the four humors of the body like the ancient Greeks did—they do science.
And the science of gym ownership is measuring what works along six different metrics.
If you’re a solo gym owner out there on your own, you have to do science all by yourself. You have to run Facebook ads. You have to run enough Facebook ads to figure out how they work. You have to spend $10,000 before you even know if they do work. You have to ask for referrals. You have to do 100 reps of asking for referrals before you get good at it. And only then can you ask yourself, “Is this even working?”
You have to post to social media every day. You have to take the pictures, you have to write the posts. How do you know if they’re any good? Trial and error. It can take you 10 years to get good at social media.
You have to create your own media. You can’t rely anymore on CrossFit, dance studios or F45 to do that for you—you have to be your own media company. But it takes 10 years to get good at blogging. I’m a B+ blogger, and I’ve been doing it for 20.
How do you get good at this stuff fast? How do you know what works on Facebook? How do you know what Instagram posts will land? How do you know what kind of blog you should publish, what kind of video you should shoot, or what kind of QuickCast you should record? You ask people who’ve done it successfully.
How do you know who the successful people are? You look at their metrics. You ask them to prove it. And then you take what they’ve done and you copy it.
Data and Proof, Not Opinion
Here’s where gym owners go wrong: They seek opinion instead of data. So you go into a Facebook group and say, “Hey, who’s running Facebook ads?” You get 10 responses. Three responders will say, “Facebook ads don’t work.” Three responders will say, “They’re bullshit; you don’t need them.” Two will say, “I’m crushing it; I get 57 leads per month,” but one of those is lying, and two other people will try to sell you their ad service.
That’s not data; that’s opinion.
We want to know: Do Facebook ads work? How much do they cost? How much time should I put into this? And if I want to jump over three years of learning, who can I copy?
The way we find this out—find the best people to copy, and then build models based on what they’re doing, and grow our gyms based on those models, and therefore elevate the industry—is through the collection of data.
Only Two-Brain is doing this. Only we are doing this at such a large scale.
Why? Because I want to sell you mentorship. Yes, I do. I want you to benefit from this data, make money on these decisions, capitalize on my science and eventually hire a coach. We’re all coaches. We all understand the value of coaching. Whether we’re doing well or poorly, we all know that we can go further faster with a coach.
But I also want you to help me elevate the industry. I want us to do science together. I don’t want to do any more guessing. I don’t want to lose 9,000 gyms every single year in the mission to change people’s health. We know what to do, but we can’t do it if the clock is ticking and we’re going to run out of money too soon.
We cannot reverse the de-evolution of our species if our gyms are going bankrupt in three years. I want your gym to last 30 years. I want your coaching to benefit your clients as long as they live. The thing that’s stopping that is not your passion, it’s not your knowledge, it’s not your skill, it’s not your sense of service, and it’s not your willingness to grind or starve. The thing that’s stopping that is running out of money too soon.
My job is to stop that. The best tool I have is science, and our State of the Industry Survey is the root of that science.
Our 2024 Survey: Let’s Research Together
I want you to take our State of the Industry Survey. Completing it will take you between three and eight minutes—I just measured some of the speeds. If you’re cautious, you don’t know your metrics, and you want to put extra time into it, eight minutes is what we ask. If you’re super-duper fast, you know your metrics well, and you’re a quick typist, three minutes is all it takes.
What we will give you in exchange is first access to the data. We publish a very thorough report on all the data and what it means every single year. I’ll also give you a bonus package with a bunch of Two-Brain materials—the link is at the end of the survey on the submission confirmation screen.
Those are your prizes. But those of you who are truly invested in this industry and changing lives, in making a good living for yourself and your family, I know that you’re not going to be tempted by prizes.
What you will be drawn to is impact. You’ve always been drawn to making an impact, and that’s what we’re doing here: We are participating in the evolution of the human species by first creating an evolution within the industry that will extend the life of the human species.
We will keep you in business longer so you can help more people.
You can help people for 30 years instead of three. You can magnify your impact by keeping people at your gym longer. You can create a legacy by building a gym that somebody will someday take over and continue. You will not fail.
I hope you complete our State of the Industry Survey. I know I ask you to participate every single year—this is how science is done: through repetition, consistency, measurement and analysis.
Thanks for doing science with me.
