Mike (00:02):
Great. The coach has totally checked out. The garbage hasn’t been taken out. And I’m the only one who’s trying to find new clients. If only there were a way to find motivated staff, people who want to help me build my business. Wait a second. Maybe Peter Brasovan can help me. He built a $1 million gym with staff members who were generating revenues instead of driving up staff costs. I’ll talk to Peter about that right after this. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by AGuard, providing elite insurance for fitness and sport. AGuard offers coverage for functional fitness facilities, mixed martial arts gyms and even events and competitions. You can also get access to healthcare insurance, discounted AEDs and discounted background checks. AGuard’s coverage options are designed to keep you safe. To find out more, visit affiliatguard.info. Welcome to Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host Mike Warkentin here with Peter Brasocan of NapTown Fitness in Indiana.
Mike (00:50):
He’s one of our wonderful certified Two-Brain mentors. Peter is going to teach me and you about a profit-generating concept called intrapreneurialism. Peter. Welcome to the show. How are you today?
Peter (01:00):
I am doing great. Thank you for having me. A really exciting topic to me, at least. Hopefully it is for many others as well.
Mike (01:05):
If someone thinks it’s not interesting, all you have to do is say that it makes the money. They’ll immediately be interested because it might not be the coolest word. It’s not easy to say, but man, if you say it’s gonna help you make profit. Yeah, absolutely.
Peter (01:21):
Here’s the other anecdote to that. It’ll help you make profit and if done right with less work, right?
Mike (01:27):
So it’s a double win. I’m pumped. I’m pumped to talk about this. We were talking before the show a little bit, I’ve done this the wrong way. You’ve done this the right way. Your gym is grossing a million dollars and it’s incredible. There actually is your partner, I want you to say his last name so I don’t butcher it.
Peter (01:44):
Absolutely. Jared Byzcko and I did a podcast earlier in 2020 for Two-Brain Business as well.
Mike (01:51):
Yeah. That is going to be in our show notes. If you want to go back and see it. And I would have said the last name wrong. So thank you for taking care of that for me. But again, I believe the name is the $1 million gym started by two guys who used to ration paper towels. And I think you guys actually did that, correct?
Peter (02:04):
Oh, absolutely. I now act as the CFO for NapTown Fitness and we started our rebranding process four or five years ago. And we definitely have the left brain, right brain rocking really well between me and the other owner. So something that we’ve always been passionate about is diversifying who does what roles in the gym.
Mike (02:22):
All right, well, let’s talk to other people and maybe we can help them get closer to that $1 million gross revenue that you guys achieved. Let’s define things right off the bat. What is an intrapreneur and how do they differ from traditional salaried staff members?
Peter (02:33):
Yeah, Mike, I was thinking about this a lot as we get prepped for this call. And I think it’s important to let’s define what an entrepreneur is first, right? Because there’s some key phrases in there and I went straight off Merriam Webster’s dictionary to get this, one who organizes, manages and assumes the risk of a business or enterprise. And those three words right there assumes the risk is what really makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur. When you’re an entrepreneur, you need your business survive at some point in order to put food on your family’s table. And we’ve all heard plenty of stories about that need, that desire to be an entrepreneur. But as an intrepreneur, you take this part away from your responsibilities. Yes, you want it to succeed, but you’re not going to have some of the tangible finances that go along with it. So yes, you’re going to need it or want it to succeed, but if you’re not an entrepreneur and it fails, you can always move on. So you can take bigger risks because someone else has taken the financial burden for you.
Mike (03:36):
You’re one step removed.
Peter (03:37):
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that’s really important to realize, because as you said, we’re going to fail at this. Every gym owner is going to fail with an entrepreneurial opportunity at some point. We have plenty of times and I’ll talk about that later. So an intrapreneur in my mind is a staff member, coach, or community member who has passion. They’re driven. They’re excited about the idea. That’s huge. They have to be excited and I call that being a champion, right? You have to have a champion of this idea, whatever the concept might be. And then a huge thing that people don’t realize is the time capacity. They must have the time capacity to act on starting the business venture. And that’s all gonna fall under the existing business umbrella. And I know Chris Cooper talks about that often in a lot of his Two-Brain business talks, but they don’t have the financial capital or overhead risk. So, those two big ones there there’s a champion and there’s time capacity must be involved in an intrapreneurial decision.
Mike (04:34):
So essentially you’ve got an entrepreneur or several and you’ve got intrepreneurial almost working underneath them. So you’ve got the main person or people are shouldering the risk and we’re talking like leases, insurance, probably equipment and there’s other stuff, but those are the kind of the big ones, heating and electricity and all those other costs are being shouldered by the main person or people. And then beneath that you have someone who can build a smaller business inside that business with much less risk. So he or she still has some investment and has to generate some growth and find clients and things like that. But can then leverage the existing space, the existing marketing systems, the existing billing software and all these different things. Where if let’s say I wanted to set up an Olympic lifting program in your gym. I could then use your barbells, your space, your booking software, your billing, your insurance, your lights, your electricity, but it would probably be on me depending on our contract to figure out where I’m going to get my clients. And of course you’re going to offer assistance, but I have some responsibility, but ultimately if the business fails, that smaller business, it only affects you to a small degree.
Peter (05:38):
Absolutely you hit it all. And Chris Cooper in again, some older podcasts, they define it in tons of depth. So if you’re just a gym owner that hasn’t really gotten into what an intrapreneurialism is, but some great podcasts and things that Two-Brain has done in the past. As we dive into this Mike, I really want to talk about like, once you’re an owner and you start with an intrapreneur now, what? I think Two-Brain really sets you up for success, but then you have to drive that success forward. And so if you’re a Two-Brain client already, you have a good grasp of this stuff, but how do you make it into a $60,000 a year revenue stream? Or one of mine is actually $190,000 revenue stream. And I’ll talk about that a little bit as well. Right?
Mike (06:21):
That’s more than the gross of some gyms. Well, that’s incredible. And this is a good place to mention that if you want more info on this stuff in a book form, we have an ebook it’s called intrepreneurialism 101. It is in the free tool section of TwBrain business.com. So head there, go to the top nav bar and download that guide. It’s got sections there that apply to owners and to coaches and it’ll help both sides understand how the system works. So let’s get into some details here for a podcast listeners. Talk to me about some specific details of intrepreneurial programs and how they benefit employees and employers.
Peter (06:51):
Yeah. So as I said earlier, typically this is going to be a coach if you’re in the gym format, if you’re not in a gym format, it could be just any type of staff member that’s seeking to help grow your pie. We talk about that often in the business world, right? So what happens is, especially in the coaching world is the best of the best coaches should really only be coaching about 15 to 18 classes a week. And we know that there’s just burnout. There’s emotional coaching capacity. It’s just gone at that. So how are we going to make up a 40 hour work week or more and drive more finances because if they don’t grow the pie, then they’re just taking money out of the owner’s pocket or whatever else it might be. So oftentimes we’ll talk about things like the four ninths model and starting there for coaching.
Peter (07:38):
And then you’ll talk about that for personal training and some of these things that already exist, right? We have our staples like nutrition, personal training and group classes. And that’s semi easy to talk about the four ninths model, but when someone goes into intrapreneurialism, there needs to be a little bit more creativity. Maybe a bonus structure gets introduced because there is a big time component to being an intrapreneur. Although there’s not a lot of the other things that happen from the entrepreneurial standpoint. So again, I’m gonna go back to that. We need to grow the pie. And then once they grow the pie, we can give them more opportunities to take more money. And this is also referred to sometimes for some of the experts, AKA Chris Cooper, as the salary cap, right? Because if there’s only so much money in the business, you can only get to a point that you can only pay your staff X amount of dollars, but if they can help grow the pie, then they could take out more money. And that’s where intrapreneurial-ism slides in is I guess a piece of the pie I’m gonna go with this analogy longer. And so if they slide in a bigger piece then the pie will get bigger and now we’ll have more money to pay them. So that’s a really big thing. You want to create opportunities for your staff. And that’s where intrepreneurial becomes very important.
Mike (08:45):
So for the people who are listening and don’t know the four nines model, the very basics of it are that in any, you’ve got all your revenue, 4/9ths, that 44% is going to go to pay the staff member. So the greatest piece of the pie goes to the staff member. 22% is allocated to cover your fixed costs. And 33% is allocated to profit. So that’s just a rough general breakdown. But again, in this intrapreneurial situation, you can make some small adjustments, like you talked about bonus structures and things like that because, uh, there are different ways that you can play with this whole thing, but that’s the basic model. And Chris has written about this all over the place. The 4/9ths model. The best part about it is that it prevents you from getting into huge staffing costs because I’ve seen gyms, we’ve all heard about them who have paid their staff members 60% of revenue or 70 or something like that. It’s not enough for the business to cover its fixed costs and profit. So you’ll get gyms that have $3 million in revenue. And at the end of the year, they’re splitting $20,000 in profit between two partners or something like that. And it’s just a disaster. So targeting 33% profit can be done, but you have to keep your staff costs under control. And then the best part about this is what you said where, that 44%, if it’s $10,000, it’s, you know, X, if it’s a hundred thousand dollars, that number gets bigger and bigger as you grow it exponentially. So your staff costs are always tied to revenue in that case. And you don’t have these sink holes of staffing that are just hourly classes and revenue comes in. So, tell me more.
Peter (10:18):
The 4/9ths model, and I’m not gonna dive into this cause there’s infinite podcasts on this, but this is when it becomes the most apparent and important to me because now you’re an intrapreneur and you make 44% of whatever your let’s do the kids program, for example. So you bring in and you’re going to make that as your salary or your income, but now how do they grow the kids program? Where does the extra money come from to buy more kids’ barbells that you never bought in the first five years or softer plyo boxes finally because kids can’t bust up their shins, like adults can, on and on and on, right? So now you tell them, Hey, you have 11% or start like 6%. So I always start small. Here’s a tidbit, always start small as an owner with whatever you might be giving in a budget and then you could grow the budget.
Peter (11:04):
But if you shoot yourself in the foot, then start to retract there. And I’ve learned that, trust me. So our kids coach, you know, OK, you’re gonna get 44% of whatever you bring in and I’m going to support you. I’m going to mentor you. But then I’m going to give you 5% as your costs. If you want to buy barbells or add another staff member, here’s what you can. And she’s done that and it’s been phenomenal. So it’s been a great way for her to grow that. And now she understands that, OK, say, I’m going to give her 10% total. And she only spends five. There’s her bonus structure right there. You have 10% of revenue to spend on whatever you want to spend it on for your budget. And the less you spend more, you can take home at the end of the year or each quarter.
Mike (11:42):
It sounds like you’re almost taking some of your fixed costs there and just passing a little bit of responsibility on to that staff member to manage some of that, right?
Peter (11:51):
Yeah, because part an intrapreneur as well, and something that we didn’t really talk about is these people want, they’re excited for an opportunity to be some type of owner or some type of manager. And in the gym world, you kind of have two options. We hear it, go start your own thing or start an intrapreneur.,
Peter (12:09):
And if you go start your own thing, then that goes where we’ve talked about my, like the 1000 different overhead costs and stressors that come along with that. So if you have a gym like ours, which I really believe in NapTwon Fitness, we in Indianapolis, Indiana, have a very strong brand.
Peter (12:24):
And so if a staff member wants to start NapTown kids, NapTown nutrition, other NapTown opportunities, they just put it under our umbrella and they have instant marketing. Instant credibility.
Mike (12:34):
You’ve done so much already that the name means something. So it’s like it’s a huge gift.
Peter (12:40):
Yeah, exactly. So now these intrepreneurs are essentially leaders in their own brand, but they have the guidance of us. So now they also get self fulfillment. It’s not always about finances either. And that’s where a lot of us get caught up. Well, I’ll just find a way to pay them more. Some people don’t really care to get paid more. Maybe they have a significant other, maybe money just doesn’t matter to them, but they want that self fulfillment, self-actualization, and this gives them those opportunities.
Mike (13:02):
And this solves a huge problem. Like in the fitness industry, there has been for decades, coaches can’t make enough money, right? And you see people like I’ve always made this joke that like an exercise physiology degree should come with an application for the fire department. And I don’t mean that in a mean way. Some of my good friends are exercise physiology grads, but the reality is that I don’t know very many that work in the industry. I know more that have gone outside the industry. And the reality is like, if you sit there at a traditional model and you’re trying to find a way to coach 40 hours a week and make a good salary, you’re going to burn out or you’re not going to make enough because you’re working at say like a big box store where you’re getting $15 an hour or something like that, or it’s just not sustainable.
Mike (13:43):
So if we create this the right way, you could still coach, pursue your passion in the gym, working with people at say 58 hours, reasonable, grow some other stuff on the side. And all of a sudden, and Chris has broken this down in spreadsheets. You can now have coaches that are making real sustainable, livable incomes and keeps good people in the industry. So this really does solve a problem. We’re going to get into finding exactly like how to find those people. But I’ll ask you first, just you’ve done this at your gym. So how has this whole thing affected NapTown Fitness? Like, was this the thing that just skyrocketed revenue or was this something that you kind of messed around with for a bit and then finally hit the nail on the head? Or how did it go?
Peter (14:17):
I’ve talked about this already a little bit, but for us, the way it’s gone is we found passionate champion style people. And it started, our first intrepreneur was my wife. She worked at Lululemon for a long time. She has a really strong background in marketing and just charisma.
Peter (14:37):
And all of that led to her becoming a really devoted yoga teacher.
Peter (14:42):
And so we actually didn’t really have a nutrition program or not a sustainable one yet. And we were just dabbling in personal training back in our second year of being open so eight years ago. But she just had this way of creating a marketing network of connecting to people and making people that maybe never did yoga want to try yoga. And so we already had a gym, we had all this space and I know tons of gyms have tried yoga and I’d be happy to jump on calls with you guys about that type of stuff. We just used the middle of our floor and she created yoga in the general sense of what yoga should be. She didn’t create CrossFit yoga, which is where a lot of mistakes are made. Oh, I’m going to make this stretching thing fit in CrossFit. That wasn’t our thing. She was a champion of what she wanted to do. So then our first couple of classes, she got the local Lululemon teams to come in and take it with her. She got her friends to come in. Some other people that come in. So all of a sudden we have like 15 person yoga classes in the middle of our gym floor on off hours when we couldn’t do CrossFit classes.
Mike (15:40):
Yeah. And that’s right there is affinity marketing guys, if you’re listening to that and go get that guide from our free tools section as well, because what Peter’s wife did was use her connections to get one, two, three, four steps down the line. And then fill the space in the gym that was dead.
Peter (15:52):
And then, so we talked about this too. Like, how do you start an intrapreneur program? Well, you want to have as little overhead as possible. She had zero overhead. She just did it in an off hours in a place that in the middle of summer, there was no AC. There was just some fans running. I mean, the lights were basically off. I mean all the crazy things and it worked. So we were one of those gyms that had space to knock down some walls. And so we, it was a no brainer. She was champion of the program. We basically said, Hey, we need you to teach these classes. If we’re going to knock down these walls, this is going to cost us $10,000 to remodel. How are we going to then turn this into a revenue stream to A, pay you, and B, pay us back, right?
Peter (16:31):
So we’re always thinking about the cost that might be associated with us investing in it. Because eventually as an owner, you become an investor into this program. And it’s your choice either say, I’m just going to be a silent investor, or I want to be an investor that also becomes a mentor because as an owner, this is going to be your first step of really mentoring outside of just coaching and getting your staff up. You’re going to mentor someone in their new program. We did exactly that. We knocked out some walls. We didn’t put any flooring down. And then from there she put flooring down, we knocked down more walls put in windows and she just kept growing this program. But the most important thing, Mike, and anyone listening is she kept the foot on the gas pedal. She kept coming to us and telling us what she needed to make the program successful.
Peter (17:13):
I need to buy yoga mats. Well, how can we get yoga mats without spending too much money? Oh, I have connection to Lululemon. Oh, they do these drives. Oh, we have a connection. It was just always these mentoring and asking the right questions and for us, so we started yoga in the middle of our gym floor. We knocked down one wall, we put in flooring and then we were like yoga’s successful. We’re going to go expand our business. We got a separate building that we put boot camp and yoga in. That went really well. So now yoga in our mind, or in our brand has a location with two rooms and it’s its own building and Practice Indy yoga is its own brand, but it all falls under one LLC of NapTown Fitness.
Mike (17:52):
So you essentially started, I’m going to guess your yoga program probably rivals like the revenues of some small gyms and you started this basically in dead space. You know, when there’s no one in the gym, you just got to turn the lights and add some chanting and stretching.
Peter (18:06):
Absolutely. And, again though, like we took it and she made it a business plan. You have to make a business plan. You can’t just let someone wing i.t and it doesn’t have to be a 20 page business plan you learn in college, but it needs to have legs and you have to let it learn how to grow. So yeah, our yoga program had zero overhead and basically it was free at the beginning. So last year in 2019, it was $190,000 gross program of the 1 million that we made. Now we do yoga teacher trainings. Now we’ve grown this exponentially and some of the yoga teachers can make some really nice living on it. But, yeah, 190,000 in just our yoga program that started in the middle of our gym floor eight years ago.
Mike (18:47):
Wow. And one of the things that you mentioned that I’ll bring up is tying expenses to revenue, and that is actually a square on the Two-Brain Growth ToolKit. Now where we as entrepreneurs get better at stuff, it’s like, I’m not going to buy those sandbags because they’re super cool and they use them at the CrossFit Games and I really want 20 of them in the corner of the gym. It’s like, how do I pay for this stuff? And do they drive new revenue? And I’ll tell you sandbags, probably won’t, you know, if you look at this, if I knocked down that wall and add these, you know, moderately priced yoga mats and do this, this, this, how am I going to see that 10 grand back? Yup. And then you’re going to see 190 grand. So the whole thing is like learning how to start tying expenses to revenue.
Mike (19:26):
And that includes the staffing, all the other things. And you’ve done that. So that’s a really important concept for people to know is like, it’s not just about randomly buying stuff that you think might work. You’ve got to put a plan in place. And the interesting kind of, you know, shared responsibility here is that you, as the big cheese are responsible for making the huge decisions, like knocking down a wall, investing in this other stuff, but the program director, for lack of a better term, your wife in this case is still responsible for understanding other parts of the plant implementing and creating other parts of the plan and then driving the bus. Correct.
Peter (19:57):
Absolutely. And I definitely should make sure I say, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies, right? Like this didn’t happen just like driving down the smoothest highway we’ve ever had. And we’ve had to make some really tough decisions. My wife taught every yoga class at the beginning when, especially as we grew just like many of us, right. We used to coach 25, 30 classes a week. And we were like, Oh, this is the only way. We had to find ways to mentor her. She actually did the Two-Brain Business mentorship, and then she went out and found her own mentorship that fit better for yoga. And now she has over two and a half years of mentorship. She’s been out to California to take classes from people in California and New York and Chicago because she knew she needed to learn from the best in order to bring the best to a smaller demographic here in Indianapolis. So again, there was a lot of investment into her. Thankfully she’s my wife in this case, but we did a lot of things similar for our nutrition and kids program.
Peter (20:48):
We’ll talk about those in a moment. But we just put to a $120,000 into a building three years ago for yoga to have its own space. But now that means that there’s floods in the yoga space. That means the alarm goes off at two in the morning. That means that a yoga teacher doesn’t show up. And that means our staff, we have 47 staff members between everything we do now because yoga takes a lot of teachers, like yoga teachers can only teach six to eight classes a week before their burnout happens. And it’s a whole new industry. Talk about the big cheese, me and the other owner here, Jared, we had to learn a whole new industry in rapid success because we had to learn how to guide yoga teachers.
Mike (21:25):
So you mentioned that it hasn’t been a smooth road. Is there anything that you’ve just messed up? You know, severely like, Whoa, that was the best learning opportunity ever.
Peter (21:34):
Yes and no. I wouldn’t say messed up severely, but we’ve just learned so much along the way. And we out punted our staff costs at one point I used a football reference for the rest of the world, sorry, American football. We out kicked our own coverage and we expanded our staff costs too fast, way too many classes. But it just seemed like that’s what people wanted. And I lost my analytical side of things for a minute because I was so excited about growth. And then all of a sudden we’re at 124 classes a week to make our programs work. And I was like, looked at our staff costs over one quarter, three month period. And I was like, Oh no, this is not working. So then all of a sudden have to take classes away or say, we need to make more money.
Peter (22:18):
Now. That was a really stressful time. And we’re actually kind of caught in some of that. Now with COVID coming out, we get a lot of classes, how to restructure all that.
Mike (22:23):
Well, how many, how many gym owners out there, and I’m one of them, have heard this one. Oh, if you put in a 9:00 AM class, I guarantee there’ll be a dozen people there every day. OK. This sounds amazing. And we’ll get some new members, everything’s great. You put in the 9:00 AM class. It’s like three, two, one, three, one. And you’re like, this is losing money. This was a mistake. I did not do this based on data. And you have to ultimately call it back. The principle there that Chris has written about is kill it or fill it. You need to find out if this class is making money and you’re figuring out your average revenue per member, per class and so forth and look at it.
Mike (22:58):
Does it go beyond your staffing costs to pay for the lights and everything? Or if it doesn’t, you gotta get rid of it or you need to find a way to get people in there and you can use intrepreneurial systems to do that. Do you want to talk about kids nutrition? Because after this we’re going to get into how to find these people and mold them. So this is going to be great.
Peter (23:17):
So we have tried, of the different programs, we have yoga, kids, nutrition, longevity, and those are the four that have really stuck with us. Longevity is our seniors class. Yes. We tried barbell class. We tried gymnastics and we tried competitive programming and we’ve actually tried to intrepreneurial retail. We tried to let someone else just run with retail. So those four, barbell, gymnastics,
Peter (23:46):
Competitive programming and retail have all not succeeded for us.
Mike (23:49):
I’ve I tried, I think, all the not successful ones.
Peter (23:51):
Some people do barbell. Great. We’ve been up and down with barbell. Before I get into kids and nutrition and longevity, one thing that we all need to look at as owners is how are you going to tie value add to your current members? And a lot of people might, you know, this is kind of a mistake we’ve made and we’re still running with it is our unlimited membership is $190 a month. You go to some of the bigger cities and that’s what it is just for CrossFit. You go take CrossFit, it’s $200 a month in many of the major cities in the US. Well, we right now have you get unlimited CrossFit, you get unlimited yoga, you get a little bit of access to our barbell program.
Peter (24:37):
You get a little bit of access to our nutrition program. We’ve kind of reverse engineered in like, OK, for $190 a month, you get a lot of opportunities. And anyone that knows that, especially that moves here from different markets, they’re like this is an absolute deal. Like this is amazing.
Mike (24:58):
I’d sign up in a second.
Peter (24:58):
But many of our members will ask us, well, where’s the CrossFit price? How much is it just for CrossFit? And so from an intrapreneur standpoint, we’re kind of like, well, CrossFit is $190. We should almost say, well, you get 190 for CrossFit and you have to pay an extra 20 or $30 for this add on. But we really believe in our program. And we, and so it goes back to the values of our gym. So tying this together, as someone starts an intrepreneur program, do their values align with your values of the gym?
Peter (25:26):
And that’s super important for us to ask ourselves because a lot of our barbell programs, unfortunately just have a lot of people wanted to start either individual barbell programs. They want it to be competitive. They want it to be more in our values in our gym say nothing about competitiveness. They say nothing about going to the Olympics and no fault to those people, but that’s not who we are, so that’s why our barbell programs, haven’t really succeeded. We were competitive CrossFit program for a while. We were competitive. But now if you look at our values, our mission, there’s nothing about going to the CrossFit Games, right?
Mike (25:54):
We had the same thing, we had the exact same thing. And it’s interesting how barbell programs and this isn’t a comment on the people in them, but they, sometimes some people have done successfully, but I’ve also seen a lot of them where it’s like oil and water and the Olympic lifter, Chris Cooper’s original gym was a powerlifting gym. And eventually I think he had to kick all his friends out and start doing actually stuff that would make more money, you know, but it’s interesting that you have the same experience.
Peter (26:18):
Yeah. And that’s what we’ve really learned over the last two years. And really it’s only been the last few years. It was a value misalignment and it was like, there’s a reason that in Two-Brain Business, some of the first things we cover is vision, mission values. In the whole thing. And it’s like, Oh crap. Like, yeah, of course I need to stay focused on this. Let’s talk about our kids program.
Mike (26:38):
Before you do. I’m just going to tell you that if you wanna know more about vision and mission, Kaledia Connell is going to talk about that in the next Monday episode of Two-Brain Radio, she’s going to tell you how to create a vision statement and then implement it and make it operational. So if you want to know more about that, because it’s going to help you with intrapreneurialism, this one’s killing me. You’re going to want to listen to Two-Brain Radio next week.
Peter (26:58):
Awesome. Awesome. What a great person for resources there. Kaleda, she’s amazing. I’m excited to watch that one. Our kids program has been phenomenal. The lady that came to us for our kids program was a member already on and off, her and her boyfriend at the time now husband, she came from being a teacher and she got fed up with the bureaucracy of being a teacher. And then she was like an ultra successful. I hate to use this word. I’m not sure where it goes, but like nanny, she was just one of those nannies that was probably making $30,000 a year as a nanny.
Peter (27:32):
But that also drained her because she was basically at someone else’s beck and call. So just an amazing leader, champion of a program. Again, she was like, I want to start a kids program. And we had tried and failed three or four times with kids programs because kids get older and people change. Her way of concepting this was she had good ties to the local school system. So she started knocking on, not physically, but virtually knocking on the doors and saying, can I do a before school or after school program at your location? And she really grew our kids’ programs by that. And she would say, OK, cause there’s a lot of afterschool programs. Parents can’t pick up their kids. And before she knew it, she had five schools and she was only one person. So going back to that four ninths model, why is it so important?
Peter (28:23):
She now needed to hire other staff because more schools wanted to use the NapTown kids program. So I think we’re currently at today, well in 2019 she made $60,000 income for the gym, revenue for the gym. She has three staff members right now. We were set to start off in a month from now here in the fall of 2020, with an insanely huge revenue opportunity. And we were going to be in about 15 different schools between the three different staff members. But it all started with a six week program and that’s what I want to get at. Right. Cause how do you start these things? You have to start small. We already talked about that with yoga. So kids was, Hey, let’s do a six week on a Saturday only class. Let’s do two days a week or three weeks. She tried a couple of different concepts in the gym, to make sure she really refined her coaching skills, and really see what the parents wanted. And once she learned how to replicate this, that’s when she took it to schools. And again, not rainbows and butterflies. I mean her first year, she wasn’t really making much, I think 2019 was our third full year and it brought in $60,000.
Mike (29:33):
That’s amazing. So the key there is really, if you’re giving advice to people out there listening start small, you don’t want to say, OK, we’re gonna go with this gigantic year long commitment program with 17 classes a week. If you’re dealing, especially if you’re dealing with a burgeoning intrepreneur so to speak, you don’t want to overwhelm that person. And so you’re just going to like, would you recommend just kind of a six week block of training or something like that? Or how would you do that?
Peter (29:56):
Yeah, kids are a little bit different, but for like a nutrition challenge, maybe a barbell again, if you’re going that route, a new type of class, the longevity, seniors, those somewhere between a four and 12 weeks. So one month to three month program, that’s what I really have found over our 8 uears is the sweet spot.
Peter (30:14):
Because it gives you the opportunity. It doesn’t show you burnout. And you say, you’re going to do this for three months. Then you know that you can at least work your ass off for three months and try to get there. And if worst case scenario, it’s only three months, like, right, that’s a blip in our life. I mean, we’ve been in COVID longer than three months at this point.
Mike (30:29):
Yeah. Unfortunately.
Peter (30:32):
And I’ll talk about that later. And talk about opportunities during COVID. Like these things kept us afloat really. Just three months, three months, start small and see what kind of champion you’ll really get.
Mike (30:44):
So then you have to have metrics. Basically when you go into it. And I think we’ll get into, you know, contracts and talking about these things little bit more later, but you have to have some metrics where how do we judge success and what’s success what’s failure. So that everyone’s on the same page. And again, I know this is coming up later on the show, so I won’t get into the real details, but when you start something out, you’re going to test it for a period, but then also define at the end of that period, what happens and what is success? What is failure? What means we keep going? And what means we don’t. Have you had programs where after three months, you’re just like, ah, not the right person, not the right program and just change course.
Peter (31:16):
Absolutely. And I’ve kind of touched on some of those, but our nutrition program now is in our fifth iteration in the eight, nine years we’ve been open. And the first time was a challenge based program. We just did a couple challenges and it was like, Oh cool. A coach made an extra thousand dollars for one quarter of one year and then another person took it on. And we really did the old paleo method. And then we tried some other things. And a lot of this again was just alignment of coach with values and coach with opportunity. And finally in our newest iteration, the gentleman that runs it for us, his name’s Hudson, he started with us, mentoring him a lot of the Two-Brain ways. And then he went and did some of the online stuff. And then we finally found Healthy Steps Nutrition.
Peter (31:57):
He did that for a phenomenal job for over two and a half years. We’ve kind of come back to the Two-Brain nutrition model and now we really wanted to bring it local. So he’s working with another local guy, because our market’s a little bit unique and it’s easier to work with somebody local. So we just, yesterday I had an hour and a half long meeting. Hudson’s been running our nutrition program for three years now and we had an hour and a half long meeting restructuring his contract yesterday because he’s in a new program. It offers different opportunities. And so it doesn’t stop. I think that’s what I really want to stay there is just because you start a program, you can’t let it go on autopilot. Our nutrition program did phenomenal end of 2019, we hit two corporate clients for a quick jump of like, I think $12,000 in three months, over two corporate clients, our nutrition program ended up bringing a $61,000 in revenue in 2019, 61,000.
Peter (32:47):
But it’s been a roller coaster. Again, you do a challenge, you do a couple of corporate clients and all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, our trajectory points skyrocketing. And then all of a sudden, all that falls flat in November because nobody wants to do nutrition around the holidays, worst decision, anyways, and then it falls flat. So we’ve kind of redoubled down just yesterday and had an hour and a half long meeting on what his goals are now and how we can help support him, how his goals changed as his family has grown as he has grown and how’s this new program going to change us. And it was a great meeting and we left it excited. And our nutrition programs has the opportunity to grow because we restructured his contract. Again.
Mike (33:27):
Peter will tell you how to find and develop your own intrapreneurs right after I mention that this episode of Two-Brain radio is brought to you by Wodify. Wodify is an all in one solution for member management, appointment scheduling and tracking. Wodify’s insights tool includes the business health dashboard co-developed with Two-Brain to provide average revenue per member, length of engagement and more key metrics. Gym owners, to receive 20% off your first year of Wodify Core visit wodify.com/twobrain.That link is in the show notes. OK. So Hudson sounds like your nutrition guy sounds like a pretty, it was a male? He sounds like an amazing employee staff member. Let’s talk about finding Hudsons and other people like him, give me some characteristics. So how do listeners that are out there, how do they identify potential intrapreneurs on their teams? Or how do they find them outside their business? What are we looking for?
Peter (34:17):
First and foremost, they have to have a drive. They have to just have an innate ability to want to be a bigger part of change in your community or change in themselves.
Mike (34:31):
Not everyone has that. And that’s not a bad thing. Like some people just want to show up amd coach classes and be a great coach.
Peter (34:37):
Exactly. And that’s, you have to kind of weed that out. And then that’s where a lot of people will fail. You’ll come to me excited and you’ll be like, Oh my God, I could start a gymnastics program. I’m a level 10 gymnast in my life and I’m just a great gymnast and you do it. And then the first weekend they have a wedding to go to. They need someone to cover their classes. And then the next time that something happens, this happens or their life path changes and all that’s fine, but that just means you spin your wheels for a couple months. And that’s why it’s so important to start small. And that is actually a real life example. Our gymnastics program, we’ve done some six week challenge or six week learning opportunities with gymnastics and sold them out and made tons of revenue. And we tried to start a gymnastics class and it fell flat. So failures, so have a clear vision and expectations. Be able to define success. You touched on that a little bit ago, Mike, but from the very beginning, when you meet with somebody and they’re like, I want to be an intrapreneur, I want to do this great, Mike, can you define success for me? And if they can—
Mike (35:38):
I’d give you a revenue goal or a member total or something like that. And if I gave you a member total, you’d ask me for average revenue per member.
Peter (35:44):
Exactly. Right. Like, and then do they have the motivation by money or is it motivation by helping people? And if it’s helping people, well, then it’s even almost a little bit trickier because how do you define the success of helping people? And that’s OK, but you just have to keep asking the five why’s. Why do you want to do this? Why will it be successful? Why will it take us to the next level and dig deep? Do they enjoy being challenged or do they freeze in the face of adversity? Because what’s going to happen the first time that they thought they were going to have a class. And all of a sudden, they double booked with our barbell class and our kids class, because someone lacks communication, who’s going to be flexible. Are you going to just make it happen or is it going to be frustration? Those are the things that really happen in gyms. Are they quick to pivot or try new things, but not too quick?
Mike (36:36):
Important distinction right there, because timing is everything, right.
Peter (36:38):
It really is. Our kids program. Again, she’s just done such a great job, but she tried so many things at the beginning. It was like, well, should we just have childcare? And she’ll teach some kids via childcare while the parents take the 9:00 AM class and crickets, you know, no one showed up. OK, let’s try it at five o’clock. And then no one showed up. And finally she’s like, well, this is not fun to me. I’m going to knock on these school doors. And that’s what she did. And that’s where we’re at. We keep pivoting and trying pivoting and trying, but she never gets knocked down. And that’s really important for anyone that you’re looking for. They just don’t get knocked down.
Mike (37:10):
The best example to give you of the timing. One is like you have to try new things and maybe pivoting to a CrossFit model in like 2008, 2009 was probably a pretty decent idea because that group fitness training really took on. Pivoting to a shake rate based model. Maybe not the one to do. Right. They’re both innovations, they’re both different programs, but like one of them had some longevity in the other one is now a joke that’s sitting on a shelf in someone’s office, you know? So like I get what you’re saying, that the timing of trying new things, but doing it with research and data is probably the best.
Peter (37:38):
Yeah. And our longevity program, that one continues. I don’t have revenue numbers on that because we haven’t for me, I kind of define a threshold. I don’t have an exact number, but it’s like, it has to get above $3,000 a month or $5,000 a month, somewhere in there for us to say, like, this is a revenue stream, as opposed to just additional revenue, which I know is similar but different. But we’re kind of, we’re still in the tinker phase with tinkering phase of our longevity program. It’s had successful months. We’ve tried some ads and we’re still messing with that. So I still think that’s a positive opportunity for us, but the girl that’s doing it, she’s resilient. Johnnie is her name. She’s resilient. This is passionate driven for her. She wants to help the older demographic. I don’t know exactly if her parents dealt with some stuff or not, but she just has that connection, that emotional connection to want to champion the longevity program.
Peter (38:31):
Again, Hillary came from an area for kids where she was a teacher and she saw this opportunity. So she’s championed the program. Hudson just believes in nutrition. He’s the type of guy that will trial by error on himself. He’s fasted, he’s done paleo, he’s done juice fast and he’s done it all on himself and then gone and got expert knowledge as well by learning from great people out there. So Shannon, my wife, and yoga, she’s gotten more knowledge in yoga than probably anyone in the state of Indiana because she just doesn’t want to stop learning. Right? So all four of these people, they championed this program and their drive for that program is second to none in our area. And that’s why these programs are still succeeding.
Mike (39:14):
So these are driven people. They’re resilient people, they’re innovative people, any other characteristics that are super essential when you’re looking for entrepreneurs,
Peter (39:24):
They’re willing to be led.
Mike (39:27):
- So they have like, they’re willing to push and kind of be that lead duck in the row, in the V for a little while, but they also don’t mind pulling behind you at times. So there’s kind of a nice balance.
Peter (39:36):
Yeah. And I mean, we find that in any business, right? I mean, Chris Cooper definitely talks about that. We talk about that all the time. I mean, if you really want to succeed, you need a mentor and you have to be willing to take the hard criticism from your mentor. But at the same time, you have to know when you need to take chances for yourself. It’s the same thing in an intrapreneur. The mentors are usually going to be you the business owner. So we, for a while had these two acuity links for our coaches, one was called the GSD meeting. And one was, I need to talk.
Mike (40:05):
What’s GSD?
Peter (40:05):
GSD means get shit done, right? So our coaches, like when they needed to either make a financial decision, they need to buy new equipment.
Peter (40:16):
Those were usually 15 to 20 minute meetings. But because the owner now gets tied into these programs, guys, it’s really important for us to take this in. Yes, I made $60,000 on a nutrition program. Kids program 190 on yoga, but you better believe I’m putting a lot of time myself and the other owner putting a lot of time. So it’s important for us to know that when I’m meeting with our director of our kids program, if she schedules a GSD meeting, she just needs me to sign a check or she needs me to make a decision for her, but then she has these other meetings that we just called I need to talk, and this is because she has a new idea or she’s frustrated or she’s stuck. And like, she just doesn’t really know where to go. I know to come to those meetings with a little bit more preparedness.
Peter (40:50):
nd that worked really well in 2019. We’re kind of changing that model a little bit now, but it was important for me to realize that. And we didn’t realize that at first, I actually asked our kids coach for the three biggest takeaways, negatives, for this. And she says, having a program that feels to me like it’s a big part of NapTown, but not having a voice in our leadership. So she’s growing this program. And she said, I wish I had more say so in the leadership of the gym, because I’ve grown a successful program. That’s great feedback. Right? Sometimes she feels stuck because I haven’t given her a real budget. So make sure you’re ready to give people this real budget. We’ve worked on this four ninths model. I’ve worked off that. But sometimes it hasn’t been evidently clear to her, and for consistency in her guidance, we keep changing our model a little bit and she’s OK with it. But for a while she felt like she was doing her own thing. And then she’s like, Oh no. Now I have a mentor in you or things like that. So there’s some negatives. That’s great to know you guys as owners.
Mike (41:53):
These are team players, but they’re also very willing to take instruction. And they’re, if you use the military analogy, there may be not generals and colonels, but they’re like really amazing captains where they’re able to execute on orders. They do that. They have to take some initiative, do some stuff, but they’re also willing to work with the higher ups who are ultimately carrying the burden of risk. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Peter (42:17):
Absolutely. And their lives are always changing. Like I said, it never goes on autopilot. And sometimes when we fail in these intrapreneurial opportunities, it’s because we let it go on autopilot and then all of a sudden it fizzles out and we’ve learned that the hard way over the years.
Mike (42:34):
So it’s really not enough to just find the person and then go and step back and watch the money roll in. Right. You have to actually, like you said, you have to schedule meetings and you have to have your metrics for success. You’ve got to push people and move them along and support them and guide and train and so forth. Right. So it’s not just as simple as like finding this person and the golden goose, just starts bringing in the money. You actually have to put in some effort, but that’s your commitment in the deal as the entrepreneur who shoulders all the other stuff.
Peter (43:04):
Absolutely. And again, some of the mistakes that you guys as listeners can avoid that I’ve learned something to really hit on here is have everything in writing. How many times have we all come out of a meeting, just so excited and energized. We’re like, Oh my God, we just solved all of our world problems in our gym. And then a week later, like, did you write that down? Because we get so excited. So we’ve learned that over the years now we’re really good at writing everything down. Even if it seems trivial, like, Hey Mike, I promised I was going to give you $20 to go buy a book. And it’s like, did I?
Mike (43:39):
Isn’t it incredible how badly communication can happen sometimes. And like, you’ll have a conversation and it’s super important to both parties. And each person comes back two weeks later, it wasn’t written down and both people have exactly different interpretations of what was said and done and committed to. And this has happened. It’s ruined lives and friendships and businesses. I cannot stress that enough. I’m 100% with you. Write it down.
Peter (44:06):
Yes, please, please. As you get intrapreneurial-ism rolling because these people are going to be your all stars, your champions, as you’re going to trust them. And that’s where we fall in it. We all trust each other so much that we forget to write it down. Sometimes you give the staff members the opportunity to run with the program, but then you don’t give them leadership. I’ve touched on that. So make sure we avoid that because they’re going to need a mentor. They’re going to need leadership. This doesn’t mean go start the kids program. Good luck. See you in a year.
Mike (44:32):
Is that a feeling out process with different staff members will like some need a little more and some need a little less, because we don’t want to stomp on, you know, the flower that’s growing and wants to kind of, you know, pop up on its own. But at the other side of it, there are probably some people who are like tentative. They’re more like we’ll call them like junior intrepreneurs where they’re maybe not quite ready for all the risk. And there’s other who are like, just hands off until I ask for help. Is it a feeling out process there?
Peter (44:54):
Absolutely. So going back to those GSD meetings and those things, myself and the other owner took different approaches. We kind of split our staff up and I said, Hey, here’s my link, sign up when you want, and he said, Hey guys, let’s get on a reoccurring meeting so I know I’m going to see you because some people will just, all of a sudden start floating again and they forget to sign up for their meetings. And two months later you find out they were frustrated because they didn’t have their meeting. So each person’s a little bit different. So it’s really important that you’re talking to your staff and trying to feel out who has, what is the book, traction, get it, want it, and the ability to do it, right? Like GWC capacity to do it. So like, those are all three important things in an intrapreneur.
Mike (45:33):
So supply required structure as required.
Peter (45:36):
Absolutely. Make sure you have checks and balances. Just because the program is successful, doesn’t mean that the person makes more money, just because the program is not successful doesn’t mean things close down. Maybe you had the right person to start the program, but not the right person in the seat to drive it. That was, that’s something we’ve learned in different ways. So, you know when the next gate will open, meaning like when did Shannon, my wife, get to hire her first full time employee? When did our kids program get to hire an employee? When were they overwhelmed? So where’s the checks and the balance to say, OK, now you can hire somebody. Well, when you’re hiring somebody, who’s interviewing that person. Is it just you? Cause they’re gonna work for NapTown. And so there’s a lot of things that, as it grows too big, like our yoga teachers for a long time thought they were working for Practice Indy Yoga, cause that’s our brand, but it actually is NapTown Fitness, again, umbrellas, Practice Indy Yoga. So we had to kind of go back and recheck and balance that. And that was our fault as owners, we dropped the ball on that. Cause we didn’t check and balance that.
Mike (46:39):
I could see this happening for sure where someone, maybe it’s the wrong person or maybe it’s just the wrong setup, but you could have a person who gets a very successful program. And without any processes, structures, checks, and balances decides this is my program. And I’ve got my own website over here and maybe we’re selling some t-shirts on the side and some, I’m not saying it’s shady stuff. I’m just saying it’s stuff that maybe should’ve been discussed first because you’ve got different branding going on and all sorts of weirdness. So I think that’s a huge one to probably listen to again, write it down, but then also make sure that you’ve got your structures. And like if this, then that kind of situation.
Peter (47:13):
Yeah. Especially if you do get into the bonus structures or the commission structures because that, and we all have to look out for ourselves. I mean, in the end of the day, I don’t mind that. And that’s why an intrapreneurs is an intrapreneur, they’re a driven person that’s going to go take some risks, but they also might be the type of person that might take some liberties. And if it’s not written down and I’ve never found someone that I’m mad at for taking a liberty, I’m usually mad at myself as an owner for not having the clear expectation or the checks and balances for when it gets to that point.
Mike (47:41):
Ultimately it falls back on, you know, the entrepreneur, the higher up people to put the right stuff in place. And you know, Chris has talked about this many times, the failures of your staff are ultimately the failures of the owner. Absolutely. And sure we do, unless we get, you know, if you get a bad apple, then your failure as an owner is not firing the bad apple.
Peter (48:00):
Absolutely. Anyway, again, we’ve tried this and every single one of our programs that we’ve talked about are three staple ones that our intrepreneurs all have their own staff members now. And again, who ultimately, and this is what we’re working on in 2020 as NapTown is what does our org chart look like? What does our reporting chart look like? Because someone gets hired as a kids program. They report to Hillary, but ultimately I’m still their boss in some facility. And should I be? And we actually just hired a COO to level that out. So we, as we’ve grown, our whole business needs to grow and then everybody needs to be filled in on that. It’s so much, it never ends. And I love it. And that’s what keeps me driven.
Mike (48:37):
So from handing out the two sheets of paper towels when I go to your bathroom to now having an org chart and communications matrix, that’s a little different.
Peter (48:44):
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Mike (48:46):
What other mistakes have you got anything else in your list?
Peter (48:48):
Not having those meetings. That’s a big one. I’ve said this earlier, but having three month contracts, especially at the beginning has been a really good starting point for most of these. The one I just did yesterday from nutrition, when we said this is gonna be a new three month contract and then we’ll look into a year contract from there because I don’t want to over shoot. That’s what we’ve done is I’ve over promised in a couple of cases to the point that this program started off really successful, which great they deserve the reward, but then like I’ve kind of left NapTown, not a negative place, but we could have done better as a whole. Do not, this is a huge one. Do not do all the work for the staff member.
Mike (49:31):
- And that’s probably a tough one for a lot of entrepreneurs.
Peter (49:34):
Yeah. You have to be willing to let them fail. You have to be willing to let them fail because if they don’t learn that, then they’re always going to think that mommy or daddy, AKA owner is going to be there to have my back when they need me. And that means you’re just going to do more work. So you’re just going to put yourself back in the farmer phase or founder phase even, if you’re already in tinker and you don’t want to go back in your phases.
Mike (49:58):
So this is the equivalent of like the first bike ride, when the training wheels are off and you let your hand off the child’s seat and you’re like, I’m not sure how this is going to go, but I got to let it happen.
Peter (50:08):
Absolutely, absolutely. And gosh, for the first three or four years, I mean, it was like, I need to go take the kids certification. I need to get a yoga certification. I’m talking about me as an owner and I never did do those things. And at this point, honestly, I wouldn’t even know how to log into certain parts of our business that run the kids part or the nutrition, or I wouldn’t know where, how to sign a contract for the kids stuff, because the intrapreneurs has all that at this point.
Mike (50:33):
Does that, did that when that first happened, that situation, did that ever give you like a twinge of guilt? Because like I have that and I know other entrepreneurs have that where it’s like, for me, I feel a little guilty that I don’t have dirt under my fingers from scrubbing the floors, you know? And I feel like, it’s hard to offload that sometimes. Did you go through any of that?
Peter (50:50):
A little bit, but realistically it becomes, are you going to be a micromanager? And that’s where I had some guilt. I was more guilty that I was micromanaging. These people who I said, Hey, I trust you. I’m going to hire you to do this. Right. And so there for me and the other owner, especially like for so long for, I’d say six or seven years of our nine, we were looking over the shoulder like, Oh, I wouldn’t have done it that way. And then they’re like, well, what the hell? Heck you didn’t—you told me I got to run this program. And now you’re telling me you wouldn’t have bought those barbells. Like, which one is it, man, let me know.
Mike (51:25):
So you gotta be prepared to let them do some stuff. And you know, you obviously go back to the analogy when you let go of the bicycle seat, you make sure the child isn’t pointed toward a cliff, it’s maybe a couple of hay bales or nice soft landings. If there is a mistake.
Peter (51:39):
Right? That’s where you have to be willing to let them fail, but also be their mentor, right? You can’t be their owner or boss. In this case, you have to be their mentor. Guide them to their decisions, to help them best succeed.
Mike (51:50):
Any other mistakes on there?
Peter (51:54):
Just a last piece of advice for this whole thing is when it comes to money, is the whole, make sure you do the work backwards for their salary. If you’re defining success and I know this is actually talked about in many different business books an Two-Brain Business as well. If a coach wants to make 65,000 a year in their program, then write that as your top number on your whiteboard and then say, OK, if you’re making four nights of that, OK, well, if you’re hiring two other coaches, OK, what are all the what ifs, what are all the assumptions and make sure you stack that up and work backwards. So if you want to make 65,000, well, then this program needs to make actually closer to 150,000. If you want to make 65,000 and not work more than 30 hours in a workweek, what does success look like and work backwards? So that’s just a really important side.
Mike (52:40):
And as a Two-Brain mentor, you do this with gym clients now, correct? Where you sit them down, you say like, what is your perfect day? And you get them to go like point B is where they’re going to get to. And then point A is where they’re at. And then you’ve actually put the steps in place to get there.
Peter (52:54):
Absolutely. Yeah. We have to do that for your whole gym as the gym entity. How are you going to make your 60 or a hundred thousand as a gym owner, well you have to work backwards. So yeah, it’s the exact same thing for an intrapreneur.
Mike (53:05):
Yeah. And there’s a formula for this. Like there are formulas to help you figure out exactly how to drive. Like, you know, Chris has a spreadsheet where he shows you exactly how to create the revenue you need from a variety of different roles and tasks and programs and so forth. And then there’s a Two-Brain Growth ToolKit, which is the super cool app that we have that has step-by-step stuff that will teach you exactly how to get where you need to go. And so as a mentor, Peter and the others on the team will work with clients and they’ll look at this thing and say, OK, this client needs to get here. Where’s the problem in the business? And our Growth ToolKit is broken up into all sorts of different things like staffing and retention and marketing and so forth and saying, OK, you know what, for this gym owner to get better, your retention sucks, that’s the worst part of your business right now.
Mike (53:44):
And you can make so much more money by just keeping each client for an extra three months. You need to start checking off some boxes. Their milestones are called on our retention highway. And it’s all step-by-step stuff for another gym owner it might be like, staffing is a problem, or marketing’s a problem or something like that. But the whole point is you can lead people through this. So along the lines of that directive advice, someone wants to implement this concept today. Let’s lay out three steps that he or she should take. And may be not the biggest thing to push this right down the tracks to get it going. But what are three steps to starting an intrapreneurial program at your gym?
Peter (54:18):
Absolutely. So identify the areas in your gym or your local demographic that are in need and do not overlook something you’ve already tried. Just because you tried a kids program in the past doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be successful now.
Mike (54:32):
So I know the answer to this question because I’ve made this mistake, but I’ll ask it to you. How do you find out where the needs are?
Peter (54:43):
A lot of times it’s talking to your oldest clients. The people that are there the most and just asking them where they’re at. For me in some of these cases, it’s because my life has changed. I didn’t have kids when we started the gym and now I have a four year old and a two year old. And so we tried kids at the beginning of this seven years ago. And all of a sudden we looked and we did some thinking like, wow, I think at least 30 gym kids were born in our gym membership over the last two years, or this was three years ago. Now maybe the kids program will be successful now when it wasn’t then. And so talking to your seed clients or your most respected clients, um, talking to your staff and just looking at your local demographic. Are there all of a sudden more daycares in your area than there used to be? That’s a big bright, hello? Hey, there’s probably more kids. If there’s more daycares or is there more coffee shops and there’s more people meeting around whatever it might be. What else going on?
Mike (55:33):
So it’s research driven. You’ve got to do some research and you’ve got to identify some needs. OK. So step one, is that, what is step two?
Peter (55:39):
Identify the coach, staff member, community member who has the grit and desire to run their own program. They can’t just be a visionary. They must be the integrator and the doer. So we talked about that in depth, but yeah, identify that person.
Mike (55:51):
Yeah. We’ve talked about exactly earlier in the show, we went through the exact characteristics of these people, what to look for, and you know, by exclusion, what to avoid. So we’ve got your find your person. That’s step two, step three.
Peter (56:03):
Set clear expectations and define what success will look like, write it down.
Mike (56:09):
Write it down. We can’t emphasize that enough. Usually in the marketing show, we tell people to look at their data. We’re always saying, look at your data, but for this episode, it is write it down. So everyone is on the same page. If listeners take these three steps, what do you think is gonna happen for them?
Peter (56:25):
You should be able to add a revenue stream. You should be able to really upgrade yourself is especially if you are in Two-Brain, in the founder, farmer, tinker thief phases, you should be able to move yourself along milestones and try and get closer to the tinker phase because you’re adding revenue to your bottom line and not doing the work, so financial and literal time freedom should come to your life.
Mike (56:45):
So when you say revenue stream, this isn’t just like an extra 1500 bucks every six weeks, that kind of just shows up. This is an actual, like large part of our business that is flowing into the main hold.
Peter (56:55):
Absolutely. Right. There’s a difference between starting a challenge or a little blip in your revenue and making it a consistent revenue stream. I can look back at my last few years of data and show you when a school year starts because our kids financial is there.
Peter (57:09):
I can show you when nutrition is really hidden, based on the calendar because the financials are there. So it’s a consistent revenue stream rather than just a small blip in your one month data.
Mike (57:21):
Peter, thank you for sharing all these ways to make money with our listeners. I really appreciate it.
Peter (57:25):
Absolutely. That’s what it’s all about. And my closing remarks on all of this is, as an owner is intrapreneurship will be emotional. At some point, you’re going to have to make a decision to either pour some more money into a program because you could see it success, or you might have to cut a program, or maybe you have to change someone who started from their seat to a different seat. So be prepared for that and do your best to kind of keep emotions in check as that program evolves and grows.
Mike (57:51):
But that’s why they’re the entrepreneurs because they’ve taken all the responsibility for the big decisions. And that’s just that’s what’s on your plate because you chose that entree.
Peter (57:59):
Absolutely.
Mike (57:59):
All right, please download our guide, Intrapreneurialism 101. It is in the free tool section of the Two-Brain business website, twobrainbusiness.com. Thank you all for listening to Two-Brain Radio. I’m Mike Warkentin, I’ve been talking with Peter Brasovan about clever ways to turn staff members into profit generating machines.
Mike (58:21):
Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. This is Mike Warkentin, I’ve been talking with Peter Brasovan about clever ways to turn staff members to the profit-generating machines. If you want more direct advice based on data, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper is all about that action. Things will not get better unless you make them better. Head to twobrainbusiness.com and check out the blog for daily action items from a guy who ran a failing gym before he created a multinational multimillion dollar business. Chris shares his secrets with you daily. Thanks for tuning into Two-Brain Radio. Please subscribe for more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
