Greg: 00:02 – It’s Greg Strauch of Two-Brain Media and on this week’s episode we’re hearing from Jeff Burlingame. Now, this was recorded originally at the Two-Brain Summit of 2019 and he dives into the topic of the golden goose. What is the golden goose? Making sure you have the right people in the right roles and if you’re causing burnout of your staff, how to avoid it. Make sure to subscribe to Two-Brain Radio to hear the very best ideas, tips, and topics to move you and your business closer to wealth. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
Chris: 00:46 – What makes a good gym website? The answer to that question keeps changing. Five years ago I would’ve said that you need this rotating banner image. Three years ago I would’ve said you have to have one splash page highlighting the benefits of your service. That’s true. The problem is that the benefits of your service change by the client you’re trying to target and so you need to be able to adapt. You need to be able to add your own landing pages. Your main cover page should reflect what your most important clients want. That’s going to be different from what my most important clients want. So a website that’s based on a template with the same kind of rotating image is not going to work anymore. I use For Time Design for the twobrainbusiness.com and Catalyst gym websites because those are the most important websites I own. I want responsive design that’s going to work well on mobile. About 60% of your clients are going to come through mobile and more in the future. I want a responsive designer, which means I can contact them to make changes and I want to know how to change my own oil. I want to know how to get in there and add my own posts. I talk a lot about content marketing and that means I have to know the medium through which I’m delivering my content. Using For Time Design has been my choice now for about three years because Theresa and her team are super responsive. She can answer questions for me, she can show me how to do it myself if I want to or she can do it for me if I don’t have time. She’s created a big series of videos for Two-Brain clients in our Incubator and Growth stages to watch so that they can do stuff like build landing pages themselves. A lot of website companies try to pull the curtain in front of their knowledge. They try to hold a lot of stuff secret so that they can charge you to do the basic things. Just like in car maintenance, changing your oil, rotating your tires. If you want to do that stuff, awesome. If you don’t have time to do that stuff, take it to the garage. Theresa at For Time Design gives you both options and she’ll even teach you how to do it yourself if you want to. I use fortimedesign.com that’s what’s made them an official Two-Brain partner is our firm belief in their commitment to helping first and a strong sense of service value.
Jeff: 03:04 – So we’re going to talk about the golden goose, and this is a topic that I hold near and dear, it is something that I’ve experienced and that, you know, if you’ve worked with me, if you’re one of my mentees, it’s something that I probably push on you a lot. Something that we’ll end up talking about if we haven’t already, but really talk about, you know, you don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to wear the hats, right? So how many of you guys wear more than one hat in your business? How many wear five hats? 10 just playing all these roles, right? How many people enjoy doing multiple roles like that? Anybody? No, I don’t. Definitely not. And you know, in addition to that, to kind of piggyback on what Sherman was talking about with vacation, a question I like to ask is how many of you guys can leave your business for seven days minimum and have it not burn down?
Jeff: 04:06 – Anybody? That’s pretty good. How many of you people with their hands up still, you’re going to put it down if this is not true, how many of you now that we know you can leave for seven days, it doesn’t burn down, how many of you will have your business grow in those seven days? Few. Few good ones. We’re gonna talk about the analogy, right? The golden goose sounds kind of weird. So you guys remember this really trippy movie based on a story. The 70s version I believe is the Gene Wilder version, is the better one. There’s a child, one of the bratty children in there. Her name is Veruca Salt and she has a nice little musical sequence where she tells her dad, she wants a golden goose. Why does she want a golden goose? She wants a golden goose because it creates wealth.
Jeff: 04:55 – That goose is producing golden eggs every single day. She likes money. She likes things like that. So that’s what she wants, right? How does this apply to your business? You guys can have them, too. Golden geese, I like to think of as a farmer, right? It could be a founder, could be a farmer. Really, it’s just somebody who’s driven, right? Just kind of imagine for a second. If your top staff people wanted to build a career and help grow your business, not just make money, not just make a paycheck, actually help grow your business, move you to the next level, you’re pretty nice, right? I’m pretty sure most of us would want that. You know what this would do probably is allow you to pursue your passions. They can pursue their passion, right? We can create wealth together. I mean, you might even wind up with a cashflow asset, right?
Jeff: 05:50 – Which is, I think as gym owners it’s not something we usually think of, right? We definitely don’t get into this business really thinking that’s going to happen, right? Here’s the problem. You’re not just going to stumble across a golden goose, right? You’re not just going to put an ad out there that says make 80,000 a year and you can be my GM and somebody’s just going to show up. Perfect interview, everything’s going to go great. It’s not going to happen, right? So stop waiting for that. We want to make those people. So we’re going to build that role internally. We can work towards or progress towards a full-time position. And yesterday there was a few conversations about this. If you think about the, the CSM conversation, right? And we started talking about progressively building a role by adding small bits and pieces at a time, testing it out, evaluating, seeing how things go, and building it up from there.
Jeff: 06:50 – And that’s really what we would focus on with this role. So what do we do? We’re going to start with the part-timer. Of course. I mean, this is how most things are going to go. I don’t know how many of you guys have 40k sitting for a salary. Anybody ready to just pay somebody 40k? Hell yes. One name. All right. So you know, if you don’t, then you start with the part-timer, right? So who are we looking for? Ideally, we’re looking for somebody who possesses, if not all of these characteristics, most of them. But somebody who’s say ambitious, right? Somebody who would be, you know, ideally growth driven or have an abundance mindset, right? Somebody who is going to actually be able to help develop and grow and move your business forward. Somebody who’s driven by goals. This is something that we’re going to need if there’s going to be guidance there, right?
Jeff: 07:47 – So we keep that GPS pinpoint accuracy, right? We can set goals with them. They can attack those goals, they can achieve those goals and they can keep moving forward. Maybe eventually they set their own goals, right? Somebody who’s responsible, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t put my business in the hands of somebody who’s not responsible or somebody that I do not trust. Right? Again, in the CSM conversation, Brian Strump was saying, I have my CSM handle ads. It’s a lot of trust that goes into that. You’re saying, here’s a credit card, you’re going to run the ads, you’re going to choose the ad spend, you’
re going to choose the copy, the pictures, target audience, all of that, right? You’re going to deal with the Two-Brain Marketing team. That’s a lot of faith, right? How many of you guys have a business credit card that you’ve given to somebody in your business? It takes a lot of trust, right? How many of you have checked your reports and seen something that didn’t belong in that business credit card? Yes, yes. So responsibility is key, right? Somebody that we can trust, that is the only way that we’re going to really be able to grow and develop this role. So once we find that person, I guess I should ask this, how many of you guys right now can think of somebody within your business that fulfills some of these characteristics?
Jeff: 09:16 – Awesome. OK. Keep that person in mind as we keep moving through this. So let’s vet them out, right? Again, CSM conversation, there’s gonna be a lot of like back and forth on this. It’s very similar. The vetting process. And what are we looking for? You’ve heard this come up in a few of the talks this weekend. We need to identify what this person likes and dislikes. What are they good at and what are they not good at? The good at not good at, maybe that’s not something you directly have to say to their face, but you need to have some sort of an internal list for yourself, right? But the likes, dislikes is key. So we really need to sit down and have conversations with this person. We need to mentor this person. And part of those conversations need to include this: What do they like to do?
Jeff: 10:10 – What do they hate doing? Likes and loves and loathes is another way that we term that. I think that’s Brian Alexander’s from last year or two years ago. And then what are they good at? What are they bad at, right? So why does that matter? If they don’t like doing it, do you think they’re going to do it? Probably not. If they’re bad at it, do you want them doing it? Probably not. Right? So, ideally, really the only possible winning scenario here is that we identify what they like and are good at. Right? And guess what, that’s not going to be everything in their business, but that’s OK. They don’t really have to be you. Right? It really just depends on how involved you want to be in the business at that point. So before I get into the rest of the stuff, we’ll do a little story time.
Jeff: 11:08 – So in 2017 I decided that I wanted to take a step back, right? I don’t want to be as involved in the day-to-day business for my gym. And at the time I had some people who I thought fulfilled those characteristics. I would later find out that wasn’t true. Right. And they were eventually identified as not the right people for this role. And you know, I thought I checked all the boxes. I thought I followed all the steps. OK. And I will say, if we go back to here, there are people that seemingly were ambitious, looking back, I will say maybe the mindset was not as abundant. Goal-driven. Probably not the best way to term it. But they could follow orders. I could give them a checklist and they might check the boxes. Responsibility, definitely not true. So what ended up happening is I put some, ideally one person really into this role called the assistant GM role.
Jeff: 12:19 – It’s like you’re going to be a GM one day. Thought it was going to work out. And I started trying to follow the vetting process, build that role up and some shady things happened and I started noticing some issues. You know, one of which is not making car payments means you lose your car. Surprisingly enough. So I get a call, can’t come in today, don’t have a car. Probably not a good sign for somebody who’s going to run your business. Right. They don’t really know how to manage money very well. And you know, eventually what happened is I started seeing these true colors coming about. And as soon as I figured that out, which was a little bit too late, you know, we started taking away this person’s time eventually to the point where he had to go get another job, right?
Jeff: 13:13 – It’s easier to make somebody quit than fire somebody, I can tell you that. And when he finally did quit, true colors came out, told everybody that we fired him, talked to all of his buddies in the gym and over the next 60 days we ended up losing 40 members. OK. Which was a very high percentage of our membership at the time. So you can imagine sort of the gut punch that I got right there. Right? And the funny thing is looking back on this is the two guys that run my gym now who are right there, Mike and Bobby, stand up, stand up. These guys, they were there, right? So when I say try to identify the right people, you really need to think hard about this, have these mentoring, these one-on-one conversations. Had I had those conversations with them, I might not have chosen the wrong person to put in place at that time.
Jeff: 14:22 – And naturally this set me back about a year. It was another year until you guys ended up on board. So you really want to take your time with that decision. Don’t just jump on somebody like, yeah, they seem good. Yeah, they’re ambitious. Yeah, they could kill this, this is gonna be great. And then I don’t have to work anymore and I can go on vacation all the time. Like Sherman said, I could buy my plane tickets right now, but you have to take your time with that decision. Or you might end up making a pretty big mistake like I did. So I’ll get to the second half, the happy half of that story in a little bit here. So back to this vetting process. Things that I should have done really is probably a theme of most of this conversation, is after identifying what they like to do or they don’t like to do and I know what they’re good at and I know what they’re bad at, we’re going to start assigning the smallest possible roles and tasks.
Jeff: 15:22 – Right. One of the mistakes I made with the person that ended up not being the right fit and almost sinking my business was I assumed that this general manager role was the key role, it was the thing that had to exist. All gyms have GMs, right? You guys have been to gyms before and maybe a lot of you have worked in the fitness industry before GMs, right? That’s a thing. Turns out not so much, right? This GM is sort of this packaged description of a bunch of tasks that this person that just runs the gym, they basically do everything and when you hire them, you gotta make sure you pay them enough. You’ve got to make sure you get them enough hours and you just give them everything at once. Right? They don’t want to take the time to build that up. They need to make that money now. But if you do that, you burn them out really fast. Cause again, they’re not you. Right? You started a business, you know what you got into, you were ready for it. You’re ready to run a marathon, not a sprint. They did not. They were probably a coach. Some form of a staff member that you brought on, they’re not ready for that. How many of you guys have had somebody burn out on your staff to the point of you having to fire them or them quitting?
Jeff: 16:46 – Few of you. If you haven’t done it yet, hopefully now you don’t. But it happens. Right? And it mostly happens when we assume that somebody can take on all this responsibility at once. Right? So my best advice, don’t do that. Build the role as slowly as possible. The slower the better. Right? For my guys it was technically three years, but it was really a lot of like discovery, trying to figure out if this was going to be the right fit. Right? You guys can do it a lot faster. Trust me. So after we apply that really small role or task, we’re going to test it, right? Talked about this with Brian yesterday. CSM. Run it for 30 days. Evaluate. How do we evaluate? Does anybody remember from the CSM talk? We evaluate objectively and subjectively, right? So objective, you guys know, hopefully most of you do this, especially with coaches, right?
Jeff: 17:45 – We look at performance. So you can grade things on a scale of one to five, one to 10 whatever you want to do, or a pass/fail. It’s pretty straightforward. You did it or you didn’t, and
you did it well, or you didn’t do it well, right? You can apply that to just about anything. Subjectively is as if not more important, right? And here we’re looking at things like, can they handle it? Right? You guys have seen frazzled people, right? People that are stressing out, they’re wearing their stress on their sleeves, their emotions seep out into public, right? They have a bad attitude. They’re not consistent with things. These are problems. You don’t want that person to be the face of your business, right? If they bring their problems into your business, that is a problem. So subjectively, evaluating them is extremely important. And that’s some self-assessment on their part.
Jeff: 18:46 – So you might sit them down, hey, how you feeling? How are things going? But it’s also your observation, right? So how do you feel they’re handling it? Do you feel that they can take on this other task or this other role? Right? And if all of this lines up, and only then do you give them any more responsibility, right? Maybe you give it another 30 days with no additional tasks, that’s fine. Give them another 30 days, a little breathing space to grow more acclimated to that role or those tasks that they’re now assigned to. They get more comfortable, they start performing better, great. Reevaluate. Sit down again. And you really should sit down just about every month, but we can sit down again, we can reevaluate objectively, subjectively. How did things go this time? And if it goes well, then that’s when we add on, OK. Again, it’s one of the mistakes I made, right?
Jeff: 19:48 – Again, assuming they could take all this responsibility at once. So here’s where the fun part begins. Remember I just talked about what do they like, what do they not like? What are they good at? What are they bad at? And my favorite story for this is Bobby, was my CFO for 24 hours. And the mistake I made there was assuming that he needed this like high-level meta-role. It’s like let’s do this. You need one of these C level, the C suite, right? You’re a CFO. Cause I figured I had to be CEO, right? That’s me. That’s the owner. Nobody else can play that role. So if I’m the CEO, that really only leaves if we don’t count sales and marketing or a chief sales officer as a position is going to be my chief operations, which is Mike, and that was already settled, or my CFO.
Jeff: 20:47 – So I’m like, hey man, there’s only one seat left. Do you want it? And of course he said, yeah. He was like, well, I want to sit on the bus, let’s do this. Right? Turns out, although he does really good with his personal finances, it’s not that, just doesn’t like all the spreadsheets, all the numbers, all the reports. He’s like, yeah, man, this isn’t me. OK, that’s fine. Should’ve sat down and talked about that a little bit more before saying, yeah, this is you. You got it. And he is actually now our CEO. That might sound weird, right? I’m probably different than most of you. I don’t know if any of you want to fully step back from your business without selling it. If you do, we can chat. If you want to sell it, that’s fine too. If you want to stay involved in it with the vision, with the direction, that’s fine too. There’s a lot of different ways that you can approach this. There is no one right answer. You can do anything you want. This is just what fit me, right? So as the CEO, he now drives our vision, our values, our direction.
Chris 21:52 – Hey guys, it’s Chris Cooper. If you’ve ever run out of money, you know that it affects every single corner of your life, all of your relationships, your business, even your self-worth. And so when I found a mentor in 2009, I said, I want to share this gift with everyone. Since then, I’ve been building and refining and improving a mentorship practice that we now call Two-Brain Business. We break our mentorship into several stages. The first stage is the Incubator, which is a 12-week sprint to get your foundation built, to get you started on retention and employee programs and finding the best staff, putting them in the best roles, training them up to be successful, and then recruiting more clients. It’s an amazing program. It is the culmination of over a decade of work. It’s also the sum of best practices from over 800 gyms around the world. These aren’t just my ideas anymore. What we do is track with data what’s working for whom and when, and we test new ideas against that data to say, is this actually better? Then when ideas have proven themselves conclusively, then we put it in our Incubator or Growth or Tinker programs. I just wrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” to define who should be doing what in what stage of entrepreneurship. But no matter where you are, the Incubator is your first 12-week sprint to get as far as possible in your business. We’re a mentorship practice for one reason: Mentorship is what works. We work with gym owners for one reason: Because you have the potential to change the world with us, and I hope you do.
Jeff: 23:23 – I’m OK with that. Right?
Jeff: 23:26 – There’s a lot of different ways to package this. So they were the right people. After finding out who the wrong people were, I found the right people. I had to find the right seats. Right? And that took some time. Takes a lot of conversations. I think there was more conversations with Bobby than Mike. But we ended up meeting maybe multiple times a week. Right? And those conversations could go up to an hour and it was really just talking about goals, talking about the future, talking about where he wanted to go with this. Right? I knew he wanted to feel a sense of ownership. Right? And that was based on our conversations. He expressed interest in opening a gym. Ooh, that’s scary. Right? He’s here now. He’s going to open a gym. That’s OK. That’s that ambition. If you guys have somebody in your gym that wants to open a gym but won’t tell you, it’s because they think you’ll be pissed off.
Jeff: 24:28 – I wasn’t mad. That’s awesome. I love it. I obviously wanted to open a gym and I did. Why can’t he feel that way? But that showed that he had that ambition, that drive. I was like, dude, do you know that we can just maximize our own potential and you can just run this place. Do you want it? Here are the keys. You can do that. That’s way better. Right? Keep your good people. But it turns out, I can’t remember who was saying this yesterday, but there’s no such thing as over-communication. Right? I did not do a good job of communicating that to him. That is why he was seeking opening up his own business. He was like, yep, that’s my cap. Can’t go any further than here. Right? So that’s my fault. So that’s why we started having all those conversations. All this to say it’s going to take time to find the right seats.
Jeff: 25:27 – It’s going to take time to find the right people. I already told you guys that, don’t jump to any rash decisions after today. We are going to have action steps. You’re going to have homework, but don’t just pick the first person that pops in your mind, have some conversations one-on-one, and be prepared to take the time. I said it took me three years. That’s because I’m dumb. You guys are smart. That’s fine. So if you know what to do, if we identify the steps as we’re working on here, you can do this in three to six months, right? Because it’s apply the right roles are what you believe based on your conversations are the right roles and tasks, evaluate how did it go? Add on or don’t and just kind of keep moving that way, right? That gradual progression is key. If you take nothing else away from here with every person on your staff, gradual progression is key.
Jeff: 26:18 – Do not dump everything on them day one. Right? You’re going to need time to find those right people and to put them into those proper seats, and it’s OK if you screw it up like I did and put them in the wrong seat. You can just change seats. It’s OK. It’s not assigned seating on the bus. You can move people around. So we get into like building their career and these mentoring sessions that sit down and talk with the
m, right? What do we talk about? What do we do? Right? Here’s a good place to start. What do they need to make? And that’s need, need to make, not want to make, right? They’re not sipping Mai Tai’s on the beach yet. They’re not millionaires on a yacht unless you’re Oscar. What do they need to make? Right? So this is bare minimum. I’m eating Pop Tarts.
Jeff: 27:12 – I have a place with a roof over my head and I have clothes and a vehicle. Reliable transportation, right? Maybe not a vehicle. I mean, if you’re in a city and they can just take the subway, right? What does that bare minimum? Now we’re not looking to just give them that, it gets better. But from here we go to what do they want to make? And maybe you guys see where I’m going with this. In reality, you’re probably somewhere in the middle, right? We need them to make more than that bare minimum, but we’re not exactly responsible without any maybe major overhauls of the business to achieve this super high ceiling. But it’s nice to see where it is, right? So what do they need followed by what do they want? Now the question for you, can you provide this? Start with the need. Can I provide the bare minimum, pretty simple, yes or no?
Jeff: 28:10 – What are your numbers? Right? Can you provide what they want? That high ceiling? If not, I feel for most of us the answer will be probably not right now. Then by when. What needs to change in your business, right? This is probably a conversation for you and your mentor. What do we need to do to be able to provide this person that lifestyle that they want, right? So what’s their role during this process? Being on board. Just being OK with gradual progression. The key here is that there’s communication, right? You let them know, be transparent. I’ve identified you as a key individual in my organization and my goal is to help you achieve what you want, to make that life that you want to live, right? Because this’ll help you guys live the life you want to live, right? We help that person get there and our goal with them is again, communicate this. We’re going to keep pushing that ceiling up. If you’re not transparent with your staff, you’re going to lose them. If they don’t know what the potential is, they’ll go open their own gym. Maybe it wasn’t because you didn’t communicate or weren’t transparent, right? Maybe they were just a douche nozzle and they wanted to leave and do that. Who knows? Right? But most of the time we can say that they didn’t see the potential. They didn’t see that ceiling. You need to be transparent.
Jeff: 29:53 – What does this progression I’m talking about look like? What’s a reasonable gradual progression? This is just a sample. Generally speaking, as gym owners, our go-to people are our coaches, right? So let’s just assume that you guys are thinking about that person. Remember back to the beginning of the conversation here. I said, do you have a person that fits these characteristics? A lot of hands went up. I’m assuming they’re a coach, I could be wrong. My two were coaches, right? So we’re just going to go with this. And I can’t change the slide now, so too bad. So we take them as a coach. What can we add on? The firs, probably arguably the easiest thing we can do to help them make more and take on more responsibility is they do PT. They just start doing one-on-ones. Maybe they do your on-ramp, right?
Jeff: 30:50 – And then from there, what’s the next best thing we can do that would show us that they’re goals driven, right? They have this abundance mindset, this ambition for growth. We give them specialty, right? Create your own thing. Show me that you are this person I think you are. Right. And if they do that successfully, that’s like a nice little test you can have in there. Right? From there, maybe they take on programming. Right? All right. But that’s something you could do. It’s a little more responsibility, right? Not to say that they want it, but it’s just an option. Right? Giving you guys ideas. From here I think about like a shifted role. So rather than just adding, adding, adding, we build this like Frankenstein-esque role, maybe we shift them into a piece of our organizational hierarchy, right? Something like a head coach. So let’s say you’re doing this coaching, you’re doing this PT and specialty.
Jeff: 31:45 – That’s fantastic. How would you like to facilitate other coaches doing that? And help me with the evaluation process and the quality control? That’s added responsibility plus leveling up, right? So we shift them into something like the head coach role. So they’re growing, they’re seeing that ceiling going up, they’re feeling great about that. They still got programming, too. We’ll just say that’s part of it. From here, what do we do? Can add sales. What are some other valuable roles that they can do? What’s more valuable than sales? It’s the only thing that grows your business, right? If you’re not selling, you’re dying. If this person can be a part of that, fantastic. They’re already showing, assuming they’re successful at it, maybe they need training, they can talk to Sherman. But assuming that they’re good at it, they’re helping to grow your business. That was the key thing we need. We need them to be all about our growth. So what could this mean for you guys? I mean, it can mean a lot of things, right? Could you move out of these roles? How many of you guys are still coaching? OK. If you love it, that’s OK. So then just think about how much are you coaching? Could you reduce the number of hours that you’re coaching? What could you do with that time that you get back? How many of you guys are involved in the day-to-day operations?
Jeff: 33:10 – Few less. That’s cool. OK. Could we step out of that? How many hours are you spending doing that, right? How many of you are involved in sales?
Jeff: 33:22 – Yeah. Can we step out of that and no longer have to do lead nurturing, right? You guys all hired CSMs yesterday, right? Marketing. How many of you guys love marketing? You love building ads? Really? No way. Me neither. So could somebody else do that? How fantastic would that be if you didn’t have to deal with your phone buzzing every five minutes? Sherman told you to turn it off, the world will implode if you don’t answer those leads. But what if somebody else took them? Right? It doesn’t have to be you. You guys don’t like nerding out on what the best copy and imagery is, hire somebody else to do it. There’s a great course I’ve heard of. It’s called Two-Brain Marketing. You could do that. That could go through it and they could do the mentoring calls. Right? Great opportunity. But after going through that big loss that we went through by having the wrong person in the, technically the wrong seat—no seats were good for him.
Jeff: 34:24 – We started making those gradual progressions with Bobby and Mike, moving them up to those C-level roles and they just had their best month and year, I believe. Good job. Proud of you. So I did it the wrong way. And then we identified them as ideal. I got some push from my mentors, specifically at the time it was Jay Williams, Jeff Smith gave me the push to test it. Once we did all that gradual progression, so if you’re like in that position soon, Sherman was telling you to start planning your vacations. We all want to win owner’s lifestyle next year, right? Everybody should be on board with that vacation every month. You guys should be living a good lifestyle if you want to do that. I get crap all the time because I post a lot of fish and not as much pictures of my children. I try to keep it even guys, I try. And you know, like I’ve made those progressions over time, right?
Jeff: 35:33 – I got the push from my mentors, and once I knew they were the right people, the right seats, I had to test it. When you get to that point to test it, you leave. If you guys have read the book “Clockwork” or if you guys have gotten a push from a mentor, the biggest test you can do is leave. What happens? I asked you at the beginning, if you left for seven days, does your gym burn down? Hopefully not. Right? But does it grow? F
or most of us, the answer’s no. Right? And that is not OK. So I left for 30 days and then I never came back because I liked it too much. Right? And they just kept progressing. They’re dialing it in. They’re working with their mentor, they work with Josh Martin and he’s doing fantastic work with them, and they just had their best month.
Jeff: 36:22 – Right? That can happen. And you don’t have to go fully off the wagon like I did. You don’t have to leave entirely. A lot of us love our communities. Maybe you love coaching. Maybe you love being involved. That’s OK. But just make sure that you know you are living the life, your life, the way that you want to. Right? You can still coach, you can coach your favorite class. Bobby only coaches noon twice or three times a week, right? Once a week. Yes. So you coach the classes that you want to coach. You go on vacation when you want to go on vacation. Don’t be trapped in your business just because you’re the owner and you have to be. Right. You got to grind and hustle and listen to Gary V. You don’t have to do that, right? Live your life the way that you want to.
Jeff: 37:11 – So how do we get there? We got to take some action. On Monday at the latest, if not tonight, right? Driving home, flying home, whatever. As soon as possible. You guys need to identify your candidate and the current roles, which hopefully you just did all that, or at least got it started. Got the wheels spinning. You need to discover this person’s goals and ambitions and then try to identify what new roles he or she could take on. You don’t have to make that move right away, but you have to do the identification process, right? Step four, do it. You’ve got to do it. You don’t have to put them in that seat right now. I said not to. Right? So I’m not going to go back on that because that’s what I did and it blew up in my face. So start taking steps is what I’m saying. Right. Do you guys have any questions? Got negative one minute. So any questions you guys want?
Audience member: 38:16 – This is kind of where we’re at right now. And I think how do you structure incentives paid? There’s a million ways to do it, but create that buy-in
Jeff: 40:13 – That they’re not—really, it’s like a non-selfish person, right? So the abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset is they’re open to growth for you because they’re growing your business. So you guys know people, or maybe you’ve been this person where you’re like, man, I don’t want to keep getting this guy paid. I could get myself paid. Right? Like go open my own business. That is scarcity mindset. So to be abundant is to say like, I’m happy helping to grow this organization because I want to see it succeed and I know that I can succeed within it. That’s what we’re looking for. Good question on that.
Audience member: 40:47 – So I’ve got a coach who is in a full-time program somewhere else right now for massage, but we’ve talked and she wants to come to us full time sort of gradually as we go. But we can’t start stacking stuff on right now because she’s in that full-time program. She’s done in August. So what are some things that we can do now? So that when she’s done, we’re prepared and ready to get going.
Jeff: 41:13 – Yeah. So, I mean, do you know—so you’re talking about you have a person that you think is good for this role. They’re doing something full time right now so there’s no time to add anything at the moment. Right. But there’s a lot of preparation that goes into this. So could you meet individually with her and try to identify all of these steps that we’ve been talking about? Cause that’s going to take the time when she comes back, let’s get it done now she comes back, we already know what we’re doing, set the game plan and then we’ll do it then. Does that answer your question?
Audience member: 41:43 – How is like best to approach that situation where you know that you have the type of staff member that is so awesome because they’re probably the type of person that could open their own gym and maybe are interested in it. Like how do you really drill into them that that possibility or you know, the opportunities at your gym are just as good or better without sounding like you’re down-selling?
Jeff: 42:11 – Phoebe. So Phoebe’s question is they want to open their own gym, right? You have that person that could do that. How do you handle that without saying like, hey, screw your business, help my business. Right. Well that’s my conversations with Bobby, which is why there were so many of them because we had to work together on that. I didn’t want to see him open a gym and struggle or fail. Not that I think you would, I think he’d be successful, but my approach and the reason that he’s the CEO is I was like, I really don’t want to do this all the time. Honestly. Here’s the keys. Like do you want to just drive my bus instead of getting your own, right? And I could create that opportunity for him, right? So I had to approach it from an abundance mindset too, like why go through the trouble of getting the loan and going through all this stuff to open your own business when you can just rock this one out.
Jeff: 43:00 – And he is. But you have to show the numbers, you have to show the potential. And again, that’s where I failed is I wasn’t being transparent with him and showing them that potential. He didn’t see it. He was like, I got to just coach. Like everyday, I gotta do PT. Like I can only make this much money. There’s no way this goes anywhere from here. I’ll just do it myself. And then I’m in control. He wanted that sense of ownership, which is really what you’re dealing with in that position is probably somebody who wants that sense of ownership. So what level of ownership can you give them and then go there or start working towards it. Anybody else?
Audience member: 43:36 – Are there extra measures you take when someone starts from the ground floor, just interviewing, in their mind now that they look at it as supplementing their income, or they’re coaching at another gym, but they have all these intangibles, you know, where they can be great mirrors like are there, so basically you’d like to eventually take them away from that other gym. Like are there other nuances in that sort of situation?
Jeff: 44:01 – If they work at another gym?
Audience member: 44:03 – Yeah, currently they do.
Jeff: 44:05 – OK. Awesome. But you think they’re a good candidate? Tell them you’re better than the other gym. So it’s still, you’ve got to show potential. Right. So if that other gym is failing to be transparent and show potential, you have an opportunity. Show your potential. All right. That’s it. Sit down. Have those conversations. I almost guarantee the other gym isn’t, unless they’re in this room. And then you don’t want to say anything. Poaching, Rob. All right. Does that answer your question Rob? Yeah. All right, cool. Maybe one more. One more. Garner, we’ll talk later.
Audience member: 44:41 – I have two coaches just starting out. They both expressed the desire to make this a career. So it’s a good place to start. I also don’t want to like scare them off with, show them the potential, yeah, but don’t go too far.
Jeff: 45:00 – Leave a little behind the curtain, is that what you’re saying? So if you have somebody that you feel could fit this potential, but you don’t want to, you know, show all your cards right now because they might freak out. Is that what you’re thinking? What do they want though? Just identify that. Have you had the conversation?
Audience member: 45:24 – They want to develop themselves as coaches and one of them wants to be a leader.
Jeff: 45:32 – So let’s start there. Just do that first. And then you know, that ambition is kinda key. So it’s like when they start saying, man, I wish there was more than this during your one-on-one conversations, that’s when you start showing more. Otherwise, yeah, you might scare them off. You’re like, hey, you’re a great coach. Do you want to run my gym? Let’s do this. Right. Piece by piece. Those conversations are key.
Greg: 45:56 – Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
