CrossFit Precision Care: Will It Benefit Affiliate Owners?

Chris Cooper

Andrew (00:01):

Today on Two-Brain Radio, Chris Cooper digs into CrossFit Precision Care, the newest offering from CrossFit, LLC.

Chris (00:09):

It’s Chris Cooper here. Your gym’s programming won’t attract new clients, but it can help you keep your clients longer. Good programming includes benchmarks, novelty, skills, progressions, leaderboards, you know all that stuff. But great programming contains something more: a link between each client’s fitness goals and the workout of the day. Your coaches need to tell your clients more than what they’re doing every day. They need to explain why they’re doing it. Gym’s whose coaches could explain the why connection had a 25% better retention rate during lockdowns. Imagine how that translates into better retention when things are back to normal. Now, I want to solve this problem for gym owners. Programming is the service you deliver to your clients. So I partnered with Brooks DiFiore, who had one of the highest adherence rates in the world for his group classes at his gym to build twobrainprogramming.com. We built this for Two-Brain gyms and we give them free access in our mentorship program. But I’m now making this available to the public. Programming proven to improve retention and cashflow in your gym. Visit Two-Brain programming.com to get it.

Chris (01:17):

Hey everybody, Chris Cooper here and today we’re talking about CrossFit HQ’s new initiative, Precision Health. And I know that there are some mixed reviews about this. Whenever I’m trying to decide or predict how something will go, I tend to break the new idea down into three layers. First, will this benefit the affiliate owner. Second, will this benefit the affiliates’ clients, and third, will this benefit the staff at the affiliate. In this case? I think it’s wise to introduce a fourth question, which is, will this benefit HQ? So let’s go through each of those layers one by one. First off, will this benefit the affiliate owner? I mean, obviously that’s what I’m most concerned with. And in this case, it’s kind of unclear.

Chris (01:56):

Nobody’s really done this Precision Health yet. Nobody’s taken advantage of it. We don’t even have N equals one data. So what will we do as Two-Brain Business? We’ll test it, we’ll sign some people up and we’ll provide you with feedback and as much objective data as we can, as we go along. Here’s my opinion as somebody who’s been in this industry for a long time, and for somebody who’s owned a gym now for about 17 years. When you’re working with healthcare professionals, you always want to be working with them kind of in a network. And we’ve got this, blog series coming up about building that local network and working with therapists and healthcare professionals to create cross-referral, a web basically of referrals. And what you’re trying to do is really kind of create this ecosystem of referral around your gym. Now, the problem is that many affiliates don’t have that ecosystem of support.

Chris (02:50):

In fact, they might kind of be competing with therapists and sometimes even moving beyond their own scope of practice, to like do therapy in their gym., Really what should be happening is we should be looking for ways to extend our care to our clients. Now, you know, could CrossFit have made this a slam dunk for affiliates? Yeah, absolutely. They could have charged a hundred dollars more per month and paid a referral fee to the affiliate. So the affiliate feels like all of the hard work required to recruit their clients is somehow benefiting them instead of just in this larger kind of unmeasurable sense of like, OK, I’m linking my clients to this HQ initiative. Years ago, I had a high ticket client named Keith and his wife, Anne, and these were amazingly good clients. They both did three PT sessions per week, which was about our highest ticket package back then.

Chris (03:41):

And Keith announced one time that he was going to be paying for private healthcare. And this was kind of a taboo in Ontario at the time, you have to understand the Canadian healthcare system, but our healthcare system is actually like not very good. So if you want to talk to a doctor, you have to kind of find a doctor or a clinic that will accept cash, which is hard. And it’s kind of taboo. Nobody likes the guys who jump the line, but those of us who can afford to do it, we all want to do it. And so they were looking for preventative care. And at first I kind of was like, ah, Keith, come on, you’re gonna pay 2,500, stay overnight in Toronto for a couple of nights to do all these tests. You know, I can do most of these tests or we could set up some blood testing for you.

Chris (04:27):

And he was like, no, no, I’m going to do it. So he goes to these tests and he did some blood tests. They do like sleep testing on them. They measure his like blood cortisol level stuff and they do some fitness testing. And when he comes back, he’s telling me like, yeah, we did fitness testing and I rocked it. And then we did BMI testing and I was kinda like, ah, Keith, come on, BMI, who cares? Fitness testing, like, you know, it was kind of garbage. They took skinfold, who cares about that? And we, you know, we laughed it off and Keith felt better because he had this preventative early stage care. And I just kinda forgot about it for two weeks. And then the test came back and Keith had cancer and they caught it early.

Chris (05:15):

Thank goodness. They sent him for a deeper diagnosis right away with his primary care physician. And he had surgery and removed it. And within two months he had, you know, discovered the cancerous mass, had it removed and he was back in the gym.

Chris (05:33):

We’ll get back to the show, right after this. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Forever Fierce. Reach out to them to sell more apparel or retail items. Matt Albrizio and his team will save you time with templates. They’ll provide ideas and tell you what’s selling best. And they’ll supply marketing material and preorder sheets. If you want to get serious about apparel and retail, visit foreverfierce.com.

Chris (05:52):

Now, if he hadn’t been doing this preventative care, there’s a great chance that this could have, you know, the tumor could have grown for years before it was found and actually put Keith in a bad spot.

Chris (06:05):

So from that point on, I stopped questioning all of this, you know, secondary or primary care that people get. And I started understanding why people want to be proactive with their health. Now, what CrossFit is doing is really interesting and they’ve partnered with, I think it’s Wild Health or something like that. I’ll post a link in the show notes and they will give you like a link where people from your affiliate can sign up and you, as the affiliate owner can sign up for maybe half price or something and your coaches can sign up for half price or something too. So there’s no direct financial benefit to the affiliate. I think that might be setting some people off. However, what you are doing is creating this ecosystem of care that includes CrossFit, if you’re a CrossFit affiliate. And so instead of working against local doctors, you can actually help your clients get extra care.

Chris (06:56):

Now is this competing with affiliates? I don’t think so. Like while the Precision Care model is a lot like SEMM, which we teach in Two-Brain Coaching, sleep, eat, move, manage. It’s a lot like what OPEX has been talking about for nearly a decade of managing the client’s entire health picture holistically, unless you’re already offering all of those things, CrossFit HQ is not competing with you. They’re not going to give your clients a different exercise prescription. I don’t think they’re even going to sell them supplements, but here’s the thing. If you’re selling supplements or you’re doing blood testing, or you are prescribing meditation or evaluating your client’s sleep, your clients are just going to keep coming to you for that anyway, instead of this faceless entity that they don’t know because you are their coach. So if you’re in a position where you’re offering those things, congratulations, you’re at the tip of the spear.

Chris (07:47):

The top 5%. You can just keep offering them and your clients will buy those things from you. And we started talking about this more during COVID about the SEMM model, S E M M, sleep, eat, move, manage, really CrossFit HQ is just offering you an option. If you’re not doing that at your gym already. I think you should do it yourself. But if you’re not prepared to do that, here’s a clinical option. It helps your clients and it keeps them in your gym probably. OK. So while we’re going to wait and see if this benefits affiliates, let’s go to the next step, will it benefit clients? Well, I think we can all agree that it does, right? So if we take the cares about HQ and their relationship with affiliates off the table, I do think this will help clients a lot, get some preventative care.

Chris (08:33):

And in the podcast that I’ll link below with Julie Foucher and Eric Roza, Eric continually refers to our current health care as really sick care. And I do agree with them. That’s something that he had in common with Greg Glassman and something that I think a lot of CrossFit affiliates can get behind. So offering this to our clients, I do think is a good thing. They’re not going to choose to pay Precision Health over their gym membership. If they have to choose between one or the other, this probably isn’t for them. And they’re probably going to choose you anyway. All right, third, will this help the coaches at our gym? I think so. I think like if the coaches can get this for half price, that’s a good reason for them to stay employed with you. You know, if they want this, they might not. Where it will help them is in the pursuit of mastery.

Chris (09:21):

I think that a lot of coaches should be focused on leveling up and turning themselves into like a health coach level. Health coach is not a protected term. There is no international or national college of health coaches, which means there’s no licensure. There’s no registration process to call yourself a health coach. You just got to find somebody who’s willing to insure you, basically. And so you can find health coach certifications online, call yourself a health coach, start selling a higher value, higher ticket program that includes sleep, eat, move, manage, and just do it all yourself. Alternately, you can turn it over and let CrossFit and Precision Health do it for you. And then finally does this benefit CrossFit Inc? That’s the fourth question we’re asking ourselves. So, you know, obviously it does, right? Like they have just turned 15,000 worldwide affiliates into unpaid salespeople for them.

Chris (10:13):

There are people like me who will probably refer clients to this program, probably less than 10% of my clients I would refer to this depending, when it comes to Canada. But in the states, you know, they might get more referrals to really make this a slam dunk. You know, the winning lottery ticket for affiliates, I think it would be wise to raise the price of Precision Health and include a monthly referral fee for the gym that refers the client. I mean, if you really want to set up a referral network, it’s not a bad way to do it. And lord knows that gyms could use it. So, when we’re evaluating this, it’s too early to say for sure, yes, this works. Don’t worry, Two-Brain’s got you covered. We’re going to be doing those tests for you. We’ll pay for them.

Chris (10:58):

And then we’ll tell you the results for free. Is it too early to say this will help affiliates? Yeah, we can’t say for sure. Will it harm affiliates? I don’t think so. Next. Will it help the clients of affiliates? I think so, you know, it’s more good than bad. Most won’t need it. Most won’t want it, but those who do will probably benefit from it. And it won’t harm the affiliate because those people are not going to quit their gym to talk to a doctor. It’s not one or the other. Third will it help the coaches in the gym? It might because it could provide a model for the coach to follow when they want to level up into a health coach, you can look at like what these healthcare practitioners are providing through Precision Health. And you can model that in your own gym and DIY, and then fourth, does it help HQ? And obviously it does. So that’s my initial take. We’ll be back probably in three or four months with some actual data, some objectives results, and kind of our final analysis on Precision Health.

Andrew (11:58):

Two-Brain Radio is your source for the best advice in the gym business. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode and now here’s Coop with an invitation.

Chris (12:05):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.

 

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