Andrew (00:02):
You can generate a huge return on investment on a live event if you take some tips from Chris Cooper. On this edition of Two-Brain Radio, Coop’s all about making connections and taking action that will pay off big time after a seminar or a conference.
Chris (00:14):
Chris Cooper here with a word about O2. Your gym members will love O2’s hydrating, non-carbonated beverages after a tough workout. Even better, O2 is a community-based brand that wants to give back to gyms. If you sell O2 at your gym, you get a free sponsored event every year. Gym owners who wholesale O2 also get their first order for a dollar. Visit wholesale.drinko2.com to apply for an account today.
Chris (00:29):
Hey, everybody, it’s Chris Cooper. I love going to summits and workshops and live events. There are a lot of reasons. Number one, I just love being around people and kind of gaining their energy and, you know, harvesting the energy of the speakers, but also the people seated next to me or seated at the table. I love collaborating. I love brainstorming, but more than anything else, I just love feeling like I’m not alone out there. You’re an entrepreneur if you’re listening to this podcast, and you know that sometimes it’s really, really hard to find people to talk to. You don’t want to bring your work home with you, and you certainly don’t want to complain in front of your spouse or your kids.
Chris (01:18):
And when you’re out with your friends, you don’t want to talk about work because they’re probably not entrepreneurs. They don’t really understand it. Even on social media, it is very hard for entrepreneurs to meet and talk to other people who are at that same level and have the same context on things. Most of the others in our lives are consumers and they see products and services and pricing and value through the eyes of the consumer. But we’re on the other side of that equation. And so it’s hard to find other people who have our viewpoint. And that’s what I love about summits. I love feeling that connection with people. It’s really, really, really easy to get a positive ROI from a summit or a workshop event. But a lot of people don’t do it. What they do is they show up, they get fired up and excited and then they go home and they quickly just get drawn back into the mundane details of their day to day.
Chris (02:14):
They don’t change anything. They don’t make any new decisions. They don’t try any new thing. And so they don’t get a financial ROI. Now, maybe it’s still worth it to go and attend and feed off the crowd’s energy and stuff. But especially in times like these, it is crazy important for you to get an ROI on the ticket price of a summit or the travel at a cost, or even to bring your team. So every year we host our Two-Brain summit for one reason: to give gym owners the chance to be inspired by people that they could never meet otherwise, and to learn the top things that they need to know right now. For example, you really need to talk to Jocko Willink. You need to hear what he has to say about the crisis and the shutdowns gyms and the surge of new clients coming back in and the change, the upheaval that probably went through your business in the last years.
Chris (03:06):
And how do you lead forward from here? Well, if you want to attend a Jocko Willink event, you’d probably be paying around 1200 bucks per person. But you will also need to hear from Lisa Nichols, who has a very different perspective, but she’s there to give you energy and inspiration and to get you fired up and to make you believe that, yeah, I can do this, but if you wanted to attend a Lisa Nichols event, you probably have to go to Barbados or Bahamas or wherever she’s headquartering right now. And you probably have to pay about 900 bucks a day. You can’t hire Seth Godin at all. It took a lot for me to get him to summit last year. But these are the people that you need. So how do you interact with them? Well, that’s why I put the summit together. To bring these people, these expensive top-line thinkers, these powerful influencers, to gym owners, so that you have access to them.
Chris (04:01):
Now I’m gonna tell you about the lessons that I’ve learned from attending big summit events in person or online. But the point here is really to get you some motivation and action to get you a measurable financial ROI that goes above and beyond just the power and inspiration of being around these people. So here’s the first lesson: one new action, any action, pays for the seminar. Pays for the workshop, pays for the summit, pays for the whole weekend. So most people show up to these events and they bring this blank notebook, right? Or like an iPad or whatever. And they scribbled out every note that they can just like they were in high school, like they’re studying for an exam, but you’re not. What you’re doing is you’re trying to take action. So instead of leaving with just a notebook full of notes and so many bullet points and drawings and doodles, that they don’t make much sense,
Chris (04:53):
I want you to leave with an action that you can start as soon as you get home. So you don’t need to learn everything from every speaker. You don’t even have to take notes. All you have to do is take one action after the event, and that will pay for the entire event itself. So our 2021 summit is 399. We kept the price low because it’s online and virtual, but we also have in-person meetups around the world. And if you’re on our website, you can see what these meetups are and you can register for a meetup. It doesn’t cost any more to go to a meetup instead of attending online. What some people are actually doing too, is they’re like renting a hotel room or a beach house, or they’re closing up their gym for the weekend. They’re bringing their staff in and they’re having this staff event with the summit.
Chris (05:38):
They’re kind of hosting their own little mini regional, but just for their staff. And that’s what I’m doing. So we’ll bring our staff together into the Two-Brain workshop. We’ll have food brought in. My staff will get to meet and interact with Jocko Willink, Lisa Nichols, Todd Herman, Bonnie Skinner, Laurie Drummond, and me of course. And we’ll make this a big bonding experience to pull my entire staff forward. I’m taking this route this year because more than ever, it’s more important for me to lead and mentor my staff, empower them, get them fired up. We’ve all been through a lot. And so has our staff. They really need this message too. So here’s what to do to get a great ROI at any event, including ours: bring a notepad and keep that notepad close, but just listen. Instead of being a secretary and taking notes so that you can cram and memorize for an exam, just wait until you’re inspired by something.
Chris (06:34):
Then write that down and write down exactly what to do. Now. All of the speakers that we bring to summit, come with an exercise, a workbook, a playbook, something that you’re going to do. You’re not going to sit there and listen, you’re going to participate. You’re going to leave with action. But that said, maybe there’s something that a speaker mentions in between the lessons or during the Q and A, or maybe there’s an insight that you gained from somebody else at your table. Maybe somebody else speaks up and says, Oh yeah, you know, I did exactly that at my gym. And here’s how it went. And you want to write down those notes, you know, that’s a $10,000 lesson right there. And so you want to have something to write on. Absolutely. Now, as soon as you’re inspired to do one actionable thing, you might want to jot that down, tear the page out, stick it in your pocket, or you might want to leave.
Chris (07:28):
Now I learned this lesson from one of the biggest founders of a software company in Canada. And this guy, when Rim that made Blackberry went under, he bought up a lot of their office space. He hired a lot of their staff and he built this online business. And I won’t tell you exactly what business he’s in because that’ll give this person away. He’s a pretty famous multi-billionaire. And he told me that he always loved going to summits, but as the pressure on his time increased, he found that he really just didn’t have time unless he was gonna take an action after the summit. So what he would do is he would book his hotel room for the entire weekend and he would get his ticket to the summit. He would show up at the summit with a notepad and he would listen until he found one action he could take.
Chris (08:18):
And as soon as he figured that out, he would write it on the notepad. He would stand up. Even if the speaker wasn’t done talking yet, he would go to his hotel room and he would act on that idea right away. And because he had the hotel room for the whole weekend, he had time to just activate and work in peace and quiet. And he found that he got a lot more results that way. Yeah, maybe he missed some speakers, but he could always go back and see them later. What really counted was the action that he took. And so what he told me was at first, he felt like this kind of FOMO, like, Oh, I’m missing out. Lisa Nichols is speaking downstairs and I’m not there. Cause I’m up here working on this thing that Jocko told me, but he would get a much greater ROI if he was solely focused on doing that one thing.
Chris (09:03):
If he tried to just learn from everybody and take notes, he’d be less likely to act on any of it, especially that first speaker, because by the end of the weekend, you’ve got so many amazing ideas that you’re not sure which one to act on. And so sometimes you just get paralyzed, right? So I get it. You feel like to get your ROI, you have to listen to every speaker, but if you signed up for the summit, you’re going to get a recording anyway. So I just want to give you permission if you’re super inspired by the very first speaker or the second speaker, and you say, Oh, I’ve got to do that. I got to take action on it. Walk away from your computer, go take action, do that thing. And then you can come back and watch the rest later if you want to.
Chris (09:46):
- Now it is really, really easy to get an ROI from a summit event. The hard part is making yourself take action and actually do this stuff. Now at some live events, the best stuff happens between the messages when you’re around amazing people, you learn from their mannerisms and you learn from their presenting styles. Sometimes they’re unrehearsed comments, like the throw away lines, the unscripted answers to questions, the little jokes, they can change your life. So here are some of the lessons that I’ve picked up at live events that I couldn’t have gotten from books or courses or YouTube. And they might not have even been like the primary subject of the speaker’s talk. The first was Colin Powell. So years before the Iraq war, I was in Chicago and I just happen to like, get these amazing tickets to this summit event. I was a pretty low level staff person, just outside Chicago at this resort.
Chris (10:44):
And it was like, Oh, the CEO couldn’t make the event. And then the department head, couldn’t make the event and my manager couldn’t make the event. And so two of us got these crazy tickets and there were people speaking like Zig Ziglar. We had, Colin Powell, as I said, Margaret Doyle nd Bob Dole was like running for president or something at the time. I can’t even remember. This was so long ago. Christopher Reeves was there in a wheelchair. It was his first public appearance after getting paralyze, from being thrown by a horse. I mean the lineup was just incredible. And one of the top lessons that I learned was that you never present a problem without presenting a possible solution. And this came from Colin Powell. And at the time a lot of people actually thought that he was gonna run for president.
Chris (11:35):
And from the stage, he said, here are the problems facing America right now. And that’s OK, here are the potential solutions. And that was really insightful to me because the problems he was talking about were like nuclear conflict and pollution and the environment, all kinds of stuff, crazy stuff, scary stuff. And as he presented them, he said, these are big problems that need big solutions, but that’s OK because we are going to solve them. Here are some of the options. And that really stuck with me. And I’ve tried to teach it with every staff person I’ve ever hired first, but also when I’m talking to anybody, I’ll acknowledge the problem. If they present me with one, and then I’ll say that’s OK. And that immediately pivots the entire conversation toward finding a solution instead of reacting to the problem. OK. Another great lesson that I learned was from Seth Godin.
Chris (12:34):
Now I’ve seen him speak live about three times, actually had the opportunity to miss him in person. I kinda missed it. I was in the stage at the Archangel summit, I think around 2018, maybe 2017. And I was so engaged in some of the speakers that my cell phone just died and I didn’t charge it up. You know, back then the battery life on a cell phone was super short. And after a very full day, I went to the airport with my wife. We were sitting, waiting for our flight and I plugged my phone in and charged it up. And there was this message on my phone. And it was from Dan Martel, my future mentor, I hadn’t ever met him before. And it was just this voicemail. And it was like, Hey, Coop, it’s Dan here. My CrossFit coach told me that you were in the audience would love to meet you.
Chris (13:23):
I’m thinking about investing in a CrossFit gym. Can you come backstage, just knock on the green room door and ask for me, you know, come back, meet Seth, meet Gary Vaynerchuk, let’s get a coffee, talk about CrossFit gyms. And of course, I mean, that was my big chance to meet Dan and Seth and I missed it. And so I called Dan back right away and he’s like, Hey, come back. You know, we’ll go to dinner, but you know, my wife and I were eager to get home and see our kids. So I didn’t get to meet Seth there. But later on last year, actually with a lot of turmoil going on with COVID, Black Lives Matter, the CrossFit handoff, I mean, there were so many things changing in the average gym owner’s life that I thought, OK, we all need to tell a new story.
Chris (14:09):
We need Seth because watching Seth didn’t really teach me how to market, didn’t really teach me how to build an audience. What it did was it taught me how to tell stories. All of Seth’s presentations are usually short, 30 to 40 minutes. They’re incredibly sticky. He tells a different story every time. He has a very refined script for each presentation, but they’re always different. They always resonate with the local audience. He had jokes about hockey and canoeing when he spoke in Canada. And I’m sure he has different jokes somewhere else, but he obviously puts a lot of time and care to make it look like his presentation is off the cuff. And that presentation lasts because you tell stories. This is the number one lesson that I’ve learned from Seth over the years. And it’s probably the most important one, is that stories stick. Even if somebody is calling you names, if somebody is competing with you, if somebody is doing something different and saying that your way is wrong, ultimately, it’s the story you tell that people will remember.
Chris (15:15):
And if you tell a better story and you keep telling a better story and you tell it for long enough, eventually everybody else will fade away. This is something that I learned from Seth in 2005, and it’s a constant ongoing epiphany for me when it just keeps happening over and over in my life. You know, people who I wish were not in my space eventually go away. Dave Tate later told me that business is a battle of attrition. All you gotta do is outlast everybody else. And the way that you outlast everybody else is through better, stickier stories. And Seth has really taught me how to do that. Another amazing lesson that I’ve learned at a live event was from Henry Rollins. Now, if you’re not familiar with the Henry Rollins story, you should go look it up. I mean, this guy, he was just a punk kid.
Chris (16:07):
He loved listening to like black flag, you know, heavy metal, hard rock stuff. And, um, he knew their stuff so, so, so well that eventually they invited him to be in the band and he would just like show up and try out and stuff. I think he might’ve been a roadie for the band for a while. And there’s a great story about how he built his audience. Basically it was through direct mail marketing. So what would happen is he would get people to sign up and give him their mailing address when they bought stuff from his live shows. And then he would like write a letter every single month, like a newsletter for the band. And he would direct mail it. Like he’d put stamps on it. He would mimeograph it. That’s an old form of like a photocopier. And he would mail it to everybody on this mailing list.
Chris (16:57):
And when he got a letter back that said return to center, he would scratch that name and address off his mailing list because it was obviously fake. And then he would mail everybody else on the list the next month. And this is how he built his audience. It wasn’t just a matter of him having amazing music, or when he later formed Rollins band, having like the best band around, he’d built an audience through what we would call newsletter marketing, or we would do with email right now. And so I was really, really excited to see him speak at the Rainmaker conference in, I think it was either Denver or Boulder around 2014. And so, you know, I’m standing around and I’m waiting to go in and there’s a speaker on stage and they’re talking about something to do with software. And so I just went outside to get a breath of air because you know, it’s Denver, and walking in up the street is Henry Rollins and like one person, right?
Chris (17:52):
Probably somebody from the event who picked him up at the airport or something. And there’s a lot of people outside on the sidewalk and nobody is walking up to them. Now, if you’ve ever seen Henry Rollins before you, you would not mistake somebody else for him, or you would not look at them and think like, Oh, that’s not Henry Rollins. It’s just a lookalike. He has a very distinctive look. So he’s older now, but as he’s walking up this sidewalk, I’m like, wow, how is this guy not getting mobbed? And so I just walked right up to him, stuck up my hand and said, Hey, Henry, I’m Chris. I’ve been a fan for a long time. And he said, Hey, Chris, I’m Henry, are you here for the show? I said, yeah. He said, that’s great. I’ll see you out there. And he walked in, he took the stage.
Chris (18:37):
He was the keynote speaker. And when he got on the stage, I had a feeling that a lot of the people who were younger than me in the audience really had never heard of him. I mean, he got like, you know, a good round of applause, but it wasn’t like fan applause. You know what I mean? So he gets up there and he starts telling a story and it’s like, you know, here’s this time I got arrested for inciting a riot. And here’s some pictures. And like, here’s me living out of the van with three other dudes in the band and you know, here’s me backstage. And my forehead’s all bloody because I, you know, headbutted this other dude or whatever. And he had these crazy stories and the people in the audience just gradually woke up to like, wow, this is a father of the heavy metal movement. And a lot of people in the audience were like, Oh, I know that song. Or, you know, the CrossFitters in the audience were like, Whoa, get some go again. That’s him. You know, by the time his talk was over, everybody knew who he was and he couldn’t even fight his way off stage anymore. It was amazing.
Chris (19:41):
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Chris (20:17):
So here’s this guy, you know, white t-shirt black jeans. He’s got, you know, a little bit of a tattoo sleeve, back then that was pretty rare. He doesn’t scream. I’m important. He doesn’t have this, this gaggle of social media cameras around him. He’s not quote unquote an influencer in the modern sense, meaning he probably doesn’t have 20 million Instagram followers. He probably doesn’t know what Tik Tok is, and he’d probably hate it, but he’s an influencer in the truest sense. He’s an influencer because he’s done it. He’s been there. He’s lived through it. He has an amazing story to tell that he could share with the audience that they will love. That’s what an influencer is. The modern term of influencer seems to be tied mostly to like how many people can I get to buy this perfume. If I talk about it on my Instagram story, how many people will show up if I start a room on clubhouse, but that’s not what a real influencer is.
Chris (21:15):
A real influencer changes the culture, a real influencer strikes deeper. They alter the foundation of what we believe and think and know, and they do that by telling a story that’s true, that’s impactful. And that they’ve seen with their own eyes, or they’ve lived through. You might be familiar with Henry Rollins’ stuff. You know, if you watch the early CrossFit videos, get some go again is on like every second video. But if you really dig deep into Henry Rollins and you listen to stuff like, I know you, just Google Henry Rollins I know you, and listen to that poem, or maybe you’re more familiar with, the iron by Henry Rollins. I mean, that used to be printed in every micro gym, somewhere on the wall. You know, the iron never lies to you. 200 pounds will always be 200 pounds. That was a battle cry for a lot of us.
Chris (22:10):
But where did that come from? It came from telling a consistent story. It came from gathering his clients or his followers, his fans’ mailing addresses, and sitting down and writing them a love letter every single month. And then scrapping names off the list and writing it again the next month. That’s how this guy built an audience. He didn’t have a giant record label behind him. He didn’t have social media at all. And he built an audience by writing to them. He built fans by telling an amazing story so well over time that every person in that audience said that’s me. And that’s an amazing lesson that I picked up from Henry. Gary Vaynerchuk. So when I went to another Archangel summit, actually in Toronto, archangel’s the biggest summit in Canada, and that’s why I mentioned a few different iterations of it here. One of the headliners was Gary Vaynerchuk.
Chris (23:04):
Now I was there to see Seth and Seth is very different from Gary, but at that time, Gary was at the peak of his popularity. A lot of people loved his, you know, F bombs and yeah, yeah. Stand up for this thing and pro entrepreneurial stance. For good reason. And people were super pumped to hear from him. The problem is that even at that point 2015, 2016, 2017, he really wasn’t saying anything new. He was saying it louder. He had a bigger audience. Every second word was an F-bomb. And he would show up on stage in like a slouchy hat, old jeans, like he just was just, you know, whatever, I’m here. The problem is that his early messages, which by the way, were made popular by Seth Godin. His early messages were nothing like that. His early messages were consistent. They stuck with the audience.
Chris (23:59):
Gary Vaynerchuk became famous on YouTube because he kind of inherited this wine store from his father. And every day he would go on YouTube and would just pick a random wine, usually a pretty cheap one off the racks. He’d get on camera and he’d say, OK, let’s talk about this wine today. And this one would go really, really well with chicken, especially if it was a little bit spicy. And he was the first one to do that. And he took wine from being this, you know, kinda snooty, nobody’s an expert except for the experts. And he made wine accessible to his audience and he made people feel like they could be confident about buying wine and it exploded his wine store. And then after that, he turned into like Gary V and he started VaynerMedia. And I really respect that he did that.
Chris (24:49):
But if you watch the early videos, they really make you want to go buy wine. He talks to you like he’s talking to a friend, the F-bomb is just, it doesn’t even show up in like the first 200 videos that he does. Sometimes he’ll turn and talk to his mom off camera. Like you really feel like you know the guy. And so the best thing that I learned from Gary is to be true to your own roots. So instead of getting caught up in the hype of like who I need to be when I’m on camera or who my personality is, you really need to stay tuned to who you are. And that’s how you’ll build your first audience. Later on when you get super famous and you want to show up to events, don’t forget where you started and don’t try and pivot too much because when you pivot away from your base, you’re groundless. From Lisa Nichols, I actually learned a lot.
Chris (25:39):
So I was at an event, Lisa was not the headliner. I was there to see Todd Herman, who was already my mentor at that point. Seth was speaking again, of course. And there were a couple of others. I was really, really interested in meeting. Lisa Nichols though, was brought onstage, as kind of like the post lunch headliner. So her job was to fire the audience up. I knew that her work had been featured in the secret and on Oprah. And I kinda thought that she was going to be one of these when you wish upon a star, magic will happen. Your dreams will come true people. I really thought that. And so, you know, taking a shot at myself, I was not prepared to pay full attention. I had a lot of my staff with me. I had my teenage daughter with me and I thought, you know, maybe this will keep us from falling asleep.
Chris (26:26):
Within 10 minutes, she had the entire room on their feet. They were clapping. The people at the front were crying. They were dancing with her and there was no music. She was just like snapping her fingers. And everybody in the audience, including me was yelling. Yes. Yes. And you’ll find out why “yes, yes” is her slogan when you attend the summit. It’s irresistible. And what I realized in this room full of like seven or 800 entrepreneurs, some of them were already Lisa Nichols super fans. What I realized is that it doesn’t matter what gets you excited. It doesn’t matter what gets me excited. It doesn’t matter if it’s like Jocko that wakes you up in the morning because you’ve got this stern discipline to get up at 4:00 AM. Or if it’s Lisa Nichols, who gets you fired up at 10:00 AM, you know, because you just believe in positivity and the future and things that you can’t grasp.
Chris (27:22):
It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you get excited to continue your mission of entrepreneurship. So you might get that inspiration from Bonnie Skinner at the summit. You might get it from Jocko. You might get it from Lisa. You might get it from Todd. You might get it from Laurie or even from me. But the point is that different people will get inspired by different things. And what matters is not the source of the inspiration, but the execution of that inspiration. That’s what we’re all about as entrepreneurs. And that’s why I love Lisa Nichols now. All right. I want to talk about another benefit of attending live summits. And this is the one that kind of seems obvious, but here’s how it’s manifested in my life. I often say that I have tremendous who luck. That’s a phrase that came from Jim Collins’ book, the right people just tend to fall into my life at the right time.
Chris (28:14):
And while I, you know, I just said, I’m not a big believer in like the secret and putting your goals out to the universe. I do believe that luck is where opportunity meets preparation. And the key to opportunity is that you have to be open to it. You have to be looking for it. And when you’re looking for opportunities, you find them. There’s a lot of them out there. And when you’re looking for help, when you’re looking for the right people, you will find them. There’s no one right mentor, who’s going to just swoop in and change everything. There are probably four or five, right mentors who could really help you right now, the key is being open to finding them. And the same has been true for me with like staff business partners. I tend to find the right people when I need the most, because I’m open to finding them.
Chris (29:05):
It’s not serendipity though, because I believe in producing my own luck instead of waiting for chance. So to increase my odds of finding the right people at the right time, I attend live events, like the Two-Brain summit. I attend even online events where I know I’m going to be put into breakout rooms and mixed up with other people. And I’ve been doing this more and more. In fact, in the last 12 months, I have attended more live events than ever before in my life, even though I couldn’t travel. I like the speakers every time. Every time I like a speaker, I take something away that pays for the event every time. But the primary value that I get is in the connections that I make, even online, when I’m put into a breakout room with four or five other people, even if my business is way ahead of theirs, or even if my business is way behind theirs, I make valuable connections that I lean on down the road.
Chris (29:58):
There are so many examples of this. Two nights ago, I was invited to a summit and it was hosted by somebody in Australia. Honestly, they didn’t promote it very well, but about 130 of us showed up for this event. And I got put in a room with two brand new entrepreneurs. And, you know, both these guys, they’re both guys. They were super excited to have made like their first $10,000 in business. And, you know, the previous month, all my businesses combined, generated about a half million dollars. So financially I was way ahead of them. But what talking to them gave me was excitement. It was fresh eyes. And one of them said, you know, I’m really focused on Instagram and that’s all I’m doing. And I’m just building my audience on Instagram. And now I’ve got this and I just made a $10,000 sale.
Chris (30:49):
And I said, you know, I never think about Instagram. We do everything on Facebook. We do a lot on YouTube. We do a lot with Google ads, but I never spend time on Instagram. I never think about it. And so talking to somebody who’s brand new showed me what could have happened if I took a slightly different stance when I started the company. Now at this point, I’m not going to go try to be Instagram famous, but I have staff for that. And so if I can line this person up with some of my staff and say, what did you do? Can we collaborate? Then my business can grow. I can empower my staff. And so when you’re at a live event, the people that you meet are important. If you have your staff, the people that they meet will also fire them up. And if you’re taking your staff away, building a stronger connection between your staff will also serve to strengthen the foundation of your entire business.
Chris (31:43):
OK? So, peer support is really awesome. The second is leaders. Sometimes somebody will be speaking from a stage and you’ll think this lesson is great. You know, they’re teaching me how to do a better organic Facebook ads. That’s great. The worksheet’s great. I can execute on it, but what I really need is for this person to just jump in and take over. So for example, sell by chat is getting a ton of hype in the coaching business right now. And a lot of fitness coaches are using it. Business coaches are using it. And I was attending a seminar by somebody who does sell by chat. He gave us exactly his step-by-step pattern. We’ll put that into the Two-Brain curriculum, as soon as we’re finished testing it. But by the end of the seminar, I said, I don’t need the script. I need this guy.
Chris (32:34):
So I hired his team to come in and try some sell by chat experiments for gym owners. And you know, after a couple of months, we’ve got some results. We’re going to try things a little bit differently. We’re going to present them back to you. But sometimes the best thing that you get out of these summits is the connection. And just finding somebody and saying like, yeah, that person can help me and actually hiring them. So the ticket price is one thing, hiring them as something else. But what the ticket price does is it gets you onto their welcome mat. It gets you an open door, it gets you a connection. And so it might just open up the entire world to you, even though, you know, after the summit, you’re making another purchase. You’re never attending a summit to be sold. Every summit has sponsors and vendors because speakers are crazy expensive.
Chris (33:24):
I mean, our total bill for the summit is like $150,000 just on speakers. So everybody has sponsors and vendors and they are great. You know, a lot of the times you’ll find somebody who can really help you, but when you go to a summit and somebody’s speaking from a stage and you’re like, OK, this person’s a sell by chat expert, always ask yourself, is it better to learn this technique, try it out for myself, figure it out. Or is it better to just hire the person? And you know, that’s an opportunity too. You might not do that, but it’s still an opportunity that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t go to that summit. All right. So the last thing that I want to bring up here is connecting with your own team members. You can use events to strengthen your bonds. And when we were able to do live summits in Chicago, a lot of gym owners would bring their entire team.
Chris (34:15):
We had a second stage just for the coaches. The coaches would spend time over there, and then they’d all go out to eat together, or they would do bowling or whatever in the Rosemont area of Chicago. There’s so many amazing opportunities. And I can’t wait to get back there in 2022. But what a lot of people are doing right now is renting like a beach house and taking their staff there for the weekend, building a strong community feeling there. It’s really hard to build your team or your culture when you’re just working all the time. So taking them away for a weekend, going to the beach, going to the golf course, going for a hike, whatever, showing them your vision, and then working together on that common goal that is priceless. Getting everybody on the same page, working in the same direction, irreplaceable.
Chris (35:04):
It’s one of the things that we do first in the Tinker program, exposing them to famous people is a gift they’ll never get anywhere else. So when I told my gym staff, Hey, we’re all going to the summit this year. You’re all going to get to hear from Jocko and participate in the Q and A do the exercises, they were fired up. They couldn’t believe that they had this opportunity. And so that’s one of the things that we forget. Like we get mentors, we go to summits, we watch these videos. Our staff would love to do that, but they don’t have the opportunity. Here’s our chance to give that to them. And I’ll tell you a secret between you and me and the microphone here. Jocko’s getting my staff there. They’re fired up to hear from Jocko. Some of them are Todd Herman fans because I I’ve handed out his children’s book to them, and a lot of my staff know Bonnie personally.
Chris (35:53):
So they’re super jacked to hear from her, but what I’m most excited for is for them to hear Lisa Nichols. When I took my entire staff to Archangel and Lisa was on the stage and everybody’s standing up and chanting and yes, yes, yelling and dancing. I looked down the row and I saw my 12 year old daughter. And I thought, I am so grateful that I brought her to this event. This is what I want her to experience in her beautiful young little life. And, you know, I’m so glad that I brought her here. I am really excited to share that with my staff. My staff has been through a very tough year. We kept all of them, which is awesome. All of them kept the faith. They delivered, over delivered to our clients. Even through 14 months of shutdown in Ontario. Now they deserve to be inspired by somebody as incredible as Lisa Nichols, that they would never have access to any other way, except through me.
Chris (36:56):
And so that’s the gift that I’m really giving them. I’ll be watching, I’ll be learning, I’ll be participating. I’ll be excited, but I’ll always be keeping one eye on my staff and smiling, knowing that I’m giving them the best possible gift that they couldn’t get anywhere else, that like, I couldn’t buy for them for any amount of money. And that’s the connection that I’m hoping to make, is to strengthen my staff by showing them how important they are to me and that they’re worth investing in. So that’s the lessons that I’ve learned in between talks at the summit. I hope you got something out of this. You can email me, chris@twobrainbusiness.com at any time to ask questions, I’ll be happy to answer them, but I really hope to see you at our 2021 summit. These are the speakers that you need right now. These are the lessons that will grow your gym. More importantly, you deserve it. You deserve to be there. You deserve to have some interaction with these people, either virtually or at a live regional meetup. And you can get details from that in the show notes you can link to the site.
Andrew (38:00):
Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Be sure to subscribe for the best of the fitness business. For more from Chris Cooper, join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook/ Chris regularly posts articles, instructional videos, and advice in there. It’s the only public group he’s in. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, join today.
