Mike (00:02):
Two-Brain gives away incredible amounts of free knowledge, but why share all the secrets? And instead of chucking entrepreneurs into groups, we work one on one with each client in the first stages of mentorship. What’s the deal with that? Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper answers those questions today on Two-Brain Radio.
Chris (00:19):
Hey guys, today, I’m going to try and answer two great questions that I got in my email last week. The first question was how do you possibly make money when you give away so much knowledge for free? And the second question was, why do you do mentorship one on one instead of in a group. And that one came from somebody who’s in a group coaching program in the fitness business somewhere else. And she was wondering like, how is it possible that we match every single client in the Two-Brain ramp up and growth programs with a mentor that they’ll work with one on one in private instead of doing a group coaching program. So what I wanna start with is why we publish so much stuff for free. And my goal here, I’m gonna be completely candid with you is that I want you to take the free stuff.
Chris (01:07):
I want you to act on it. I want you to make money from it. And then I want you to take the next step, which is to seek mentorship to guide you through the learning and the knowledge acquisition and the mistakes and the growth way faster. What we’ve learned over the years is that we can’t publish enough free stuff. You know, we really don’t hold a lot of stuff back. Sometimes if we have a new tactic that’s working really, really well, we’ll tell people generally what the tactic is, but we won’t get really specific in how it’s done. So for example, we’ll tell people, you know, we’re advocating for free public Facebook groups. You can convert people to a no sweat intro by doing sell by chat, or by getting them onto your email list or whatever. What we won’t do is give you the actual chat templates or the actual emails to use, or the other conversion calls that you need to do, or the texting that you need to send. Those specific tactics
Chris (02:00):
We keep within Two-Brain, but I want you to have the knowledge. I’m doing this with the knowledge myself that knowledge is not enough. Knowledge is enough to get you started, but knowledge alone takes way too much time to practice, to iterate, to act on, to screw up and to get right before you see a ton of results. And so somebody could read my book, they could pay 20 bucks for it. I might make 2.50 out of that, maybe at the most. And they could get access to all the knowledge that they need to make their business successful. And that’s great because that’s my mission. The Two-Brain Business mentorship program is still growing every year. We’ve now worked with over 2000 gym owners worldwide, and they are about 850 currently in the program because these are the people who understand the value of action and knowledge by itself does not create enough action to get where
Chris (02:56):
You want to go as fast as possible. The next question is, why do we do it one on one? You know, I’m in a lot of mastermind programs. Every year I spend about a quarter million dollars on mentorship because I understand that mentorship is an investment that returns an exponential result, right? It’s it’s not an expense. It’s not a cost I put money in and I get more money out when I buy mentorship. That said a lot of the programs that I’m in are group mentorship. So you might talk to the head of the group once, but usually what happens is the head of a group coaching practice will lead a monthly seminar. They might produce a monthly exercise, and then they’ll host these monthly group calls and they’ll get you on the call. And you’ll talk with other people who are trying to overcome the same challenges that you are.
Chris (03:44):
And you’ll break up into small groups and you’ll work through things. And there’s a lot of value in that. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a group coach. And so you already understand the value of collaboration and even a little bit of competition, right? There is value in that, but when it comes to solving your specific problems, you need one on one mentorship from somebody who has already solved those problems and can give you more than a worksheet. They need to give you their experience and all the challenges that they overcame with it. They also need to be able to point you to the best practices or data or knowledge that you need right now. So instead of waiting for your topic or your problem to come up in the rotation, your mentor should be able to say, here’s what you’re dealing with, here is the best way to solve it right now.
Chris (04:38):
OK? So we don’t do group mentorship in our ramp up, our startup, or our growth programs, because one on one is that streamlined approach that will get you from A to B fastest. In our tinker program, it’s slightly different. In the tinker phase, there is no one expert who has done everything like there’s no expert on Bitcoin who is also an expert on buying commercial real estate. There is no expert on leadership who is also an expert on franchising. There are so many different ways to go once your gym has a baseline of success that you need access and connection more than you need one person with all the answers. And this is a actually a problem with higher level mentorship programs. So our tinker program is around 15,000 a year, but most of these higher level programs that I’m talking about would be well over a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Chris (05:33):
There’s still group mentoring programs, or maybe you’re dealing one on one with somebody, but the problem is that that person can’t be an expert on just everything that you need at once. They can be an expert on prioritization or leadership. They could be an expert in investments. They could be an expert in buying Airbnbs or acquiring other companies, or, you know, starting new businesses, but they can’t be expert to all things. So what usually happens is you sign up with somebody at that level, you’re paying a hundred thousand to even a million dollars a year. You’ve got lots of access to them one on one, but you have to only solve one problem at a time. And then go look for the next expert. Our tinker program’s goal is to bring all the experts into one place and then have coaches who connect you to those experts, to the people who’ve already solved your problems.
Chris (06:21):
And those might be other people in the group. So at the tinker level, we do use a group mentorship program so that we can leverage the expertise and connection within the group. In our earlier programs, we do everything one on one, because I want you to have that strong bond with somebody who understands what you’re going through, who knows your numbers, who knows what you did last month. And they know what you’re about to do next month. That one-on-one mentorship is super duper important up until the point where either you’re making a hundred thousand dollars a year from your gym or your net worth of all your assets is around a million. We’ve tried this other ways. Absolutely. If you’re listening to this podcast, you know, that I’m big on data. And when I started coaching gym owners back in 2012, I was doing everything one on one.
Chris (07:09):
And so I would do seven or eight calls with seven or eight gym owners a week. And we would talk through their specific problems and we’d give them resources and templates and tools to help them. And then we would build on that. And eventually my schedule just got full. I had, I think about 55 clients. And I said, I’ve gotta do this another way. What if we sold a course that would just give you access to the knowledge. And then you could do one-on-one calls after that, if you wanted to, but you’d have the baseline, you would already be leveled up. And I could work with higher level gym owners. And so we tried selling this course, this wasn’t through Two-Brain Business. It was a different company at the time. And I worked for them. I didn’t own it. And in the first weekend we sold, I don’t know, 50 of these courses.
Chris (07:51):
And that was a lot of money. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is awesome. This is how we scale. This is how we help people. And I lived on that cloud for quite a while. And then about three weeks later, I started picking up the phone and calling the people who had bought the course. And what I found was a lot of didn’t start it yet. I logged in didn’t do much work, but it looks great. Yeah. It looks really good. I can’t wait to dig in. People weren’t taking action. They weren’t getting results. And so I waited. And then after eight weeks I called them all again. How’s it going? Oh, good, good, good. Yeah, man, I’m just so busy. I haven’t gotten to it yet or, yep. I’ve set aside time next week to start. Nobody was getting results because nobody was taking action on the knowledge.
Chris (08:36):
I didn’t yet understand 10 years ago that knowledge is not enough, that you have to have action. And so I went back to the way that I had been mentored, which was one on one. And we started hiring other mentors at Two-Brain to join me. Now that team has gone through some evolutions, but we’re right at 50 mentors worldwide because we work one on one with the gym owners in our ramp up, startup and growth programs. That’s how important it is to me. Why do other people use group coaching? Well, group coaching is effective. Sometimes it’s more effective when you are more successful because you need less help, definitely, but also group coaching is better for the coach that’s delivering it. Like they make more money. They probably have to work less. And you know, they don’t have to really do anything except for come up with a topic.
Chris (09:31):
They can share their opinion, but they don’t have to track data. Don’t have to know the real answer every time, they don’t have to prove anything. So most business coaches that you see in the world right now do group coaching. And in fact, if you’re in a mastermind of other busines, coaches, you’ll find that they will tell you to get out of one-on-one coaching. However, most of them don’t track success. They don’t track how long a gym owner loves their program enough to stay with them. They don’t track the gym’s actual growth. They don’t go back and tweak their curriculum to optimize growth. They don’t say this new thing is working or let’s prove that this thing has stopped working. Right. They can’t do that without one on one, because it’s just too hard. You’re not having those relationships. And so the reason that gyms that join Two-Brain tend to stick around for about three or four years, is that one-on-one relationship that can carry you all the way through startup or your deepest, darkest struggle days, all the way to tinker phase when you’re making, you’ve got a net worth of well over a million dollars.
Chris (10:38):
So I believe in one-on-one, I believe in it especially as you’re going through it, you know, converting your gym into something that’s more successful, especially when you’re in the startup phase. You’re trying to get a good running start that’s gonna pay off over the next 30 years. I believe in one-on-one mentorship. In the tinker phase, at higher levels, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as one mentor who has all of the answers. And so I believe in the connective collaborative power of group coaching, which still has some one-on-one mentorship in it, by the way. But things change as you grow. More than ever, we need people who are familiar with our particular case. And this is why personal training is more valuable and costs more than group training does. This is why group training is like the budget option in gyms. And this is why group training is kind of the budget option when it comes to business coaching too. Knowledge is not enough. Action is the name of the game here. For most people, a one-on-one relationship will result in the best action fastest. And if that’s you, then we’d love to talk to you about it. Thanks for asking me these questions. If you have questions about any of our stuff, you can always just email chris@twobrainbusiness.com or post a question in Gym Owners United, our public-facing Facebook group that you can join for free and get free tools every couple of weeks.
Mike (11:53):
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