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Mondays with Matt is a weekly short-form podcast from Barbell Logic founder Matt Reynolds, delivering practical lessons on strength training, coaching, and business you can apply immediately. Each episode blends real stories, clear takeaways, and simple actions you can take this week to move forward with confidence.
New episodes every Monday.
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Coaching is Secondary for Business Success
Consider this scenario.
Someone becomes an expert in creating a certain craft or providing a certain service.
Maybe this is butchery, baking, or candlestick making.
Because friends and family love what this person does, their friends and family encourage this person to become a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker and start his own business.
It fails.
Why does it fail? Because the technical aspect is secondary. Business is first.
If you decide to start your own business, you are a business owner, manager, and coach. Coaching is secondary to business success. You must spend time managing and owning the business.
Coaching is Secondary: How to Be an Owner
The E-Myth Revisited discusses the three different roles in a business: technician, manager, and owner.
When you start your business, you must do all three (unless you happen to be rich and can hire people from day one). You cannot delegate any tasks.
Over time, you can begin to delegate first the technician work and then the managerial work.
If this bothers you – if this sounds like the opposite of why you signed up – you may want to reconsider starting a business. You may want to see if you can work for someone else. That's okay.
Why? Because coaching is secondary, being a manager and owner is primary for business success. Learn how to be an owner.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Know Who You Are
You don't need to have a mission statement, business plan, or core values to begin coaching or even start a business. Get customers now.
As your business grows, you should sit down and knock these out. And there really is no better time to complete these then over the holiday season, when work tends to lesson and you look back on this past year and forward to the next year.
Spend a few days creating these. Once you have a draft, step away and think on them. You might show them to someone else you trust.
Below, we give some example that Barbell Logic has created. They may be a good starting point for you.
Know Who You Are
If you're going to spend some time knowing and defining who you are this holiday season, the below may help you as starting point or reference point for comparison.
Barbell Logic is redefining traditional personal training by delivering a superior experience of professional coaching through your smartphone to anyone, anywhere, any time, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional personal training.
Our Mission
We are professional strength & nutrition coaches giving the world access to personal coaching, educational resources, and opportunities to help other improve their quality of live through strength.
Core Tenets Tenets are the underlying principles and beliefs that make us who we are.
Our Vision We create connections for the world to experience a life improved by strength.
Core Values Growth: As individuals and as a company, we believe in growth through setting goals, tracking progress, and demonstrating success.
Connection: Coaching is a window into people's lives. We value authentic interactions and real relationships with everyone who trusts us enough to open it.
Consistency: Trust and consistency are the hart of our professionalism. Every interaction is an opportunity to build trust, and we hold ourselves accountable to the expectations we set.
Know who you are.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
All In!
It's time to be all in. It's time to execute. It's time to complete that task or project or goal or dream or aspiration that you've been putting off.
No more.
Of course, you should complete a GAMEplan so you can define your goals, the actions you take to achieve them, and the metrics you use to determine if you've succeeded in meeting your goals.
But that's just the beginning, not the end. Don't use your GAMEplan as a procrastination tool. Be all in right now.
As a coach, this might mean creating lists of potential clients (cold leads and warm leads). Then, calling, texting, messaging, or emailing these people. Swing for the fences.
If you have 4 clients, don't aim for 6, aim to get 20. Schedule the time and do the work, even if you don't want to. The impact on 2024 and beyond will be incalculable, beyond the confidence you gain from having done the work.
It's time to be all in.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Strong Life with Zach Evan Esh Replay
Matt and Zach have interacted before, passing along business advice and Matt coaching Zach when he ran into some issues. Matt jumped on the Strong Life podcast to discuss why online coaching is better than in-person coaching.
For many gym owners, they feel tied to the gym, without the ability to leave and get paid. A hybrid model of online coaching and in-person coaching can help.
For example, instead of losing money during vacation periods or, even if you charge the same, not providing any value to your clients, gym owners can program for clients using TurnKey Coach. If desired, the coach could provide technique feedback on the application as well.
For many long-term clients, whose technique is perfect, moving to online coaching allows a more affordable option while still receiving technique coaching and programming.
TurnKey Coach is perfect for those coaches and personal trainers who are bad or not interested in business. Get your clients, coach your clients, let TurnKey Coach handle the backend that you don't want to deal with.
Enjoy this Strong Life with Zach Evan Esh replay.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
How to Structure Holiday Promotions: Black Friday & Pre-Christmas
The lead up to Thanksgiving and Christmas is a time people spend more money. Because you believe in your product or service, and in the case of fitness your service is clearly helping improve your clients' quality of life, it is better they spend money on your service than something they don't truly need.
This is a great time to offer things such as annual subscriptions, gift subscriptions or gift cards, and limited-time or urgent sign-ups (e.g. 5 spots at a reduced rate).
People are looking to spend money and give gifts, so encourage them to spend money on physical fitness and quality of life.
Also, avoid those times you'll likely be drowned out. You should likely have your promotions ready early the week of Thanksgiving. Pre-Christmas sales need to be out after Thanksgiving. Black Friday, and that entire weekend of American Thanksgiving, is a weekend where your ads will be drowned out and your potential clients will be inundated with offers. Deliver your promotions (ideally) before or (less ideally) after that.
You will see sales dry up around a week before Christmas. This calls for a change in strategy.
How to Structure Holiday Promotions: Post-Christmas and New Years'
People tend to find themselves less fit and having gained weight after New Years', but they tend to have less money to spend. Now is the time to make signing up as frictionless and painless as possible.
You might consider offering the first month free or some other type of free opportunity where you can deliver value and have them see how their life could be better with your service.
This is also a great time for referrals, as clients can secure free or reduced coaching as they bring their friends or family to enjoy what they have enjoyed and found value in.
Another time people are more fitness-minded is mid-to-late-Spring, when people begin to think about wearing swim suits and how they'll look with the less clothes people tend to wear in the summer.
How to structure holiday promotions? Consider the timing, what people are looking for, and likely hurdles.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
What is Your GAMEplan? Prioritize the Important
Matt shares how he discussed the business metrics that matter with Cody Miller, BLOC Coach and owner of the great gym The Strength Parlor. Cody dug in, got a hold of those metrics, and then talked more to Matt.
Well, what's next?
Next, you need to identify the goals that move the business in the direction you want. Likely, you've identified areas of weakness in the metrics.
These goals need to be important. They can be urgent, but they should not be urgent but unimportant. For example, if you fail to address something in the next couple months that would cause the business to fail, that is both important and urgent. You should create goals for that.
Establish goals for the month. You should be able to easily say, with a yes or no answer, if you accomplished the goals.
What is Your GAMEplan? Get After What Matters
Once you have set up your goals, identify actions you believe will accomplish your goals.
For example, you may aim to reduce churn from 4% to 3.85% in the upcoming month. Below are some potential actions to get after that goal.
These are some example, and they might not actually accomplish the goals. You'll need to be able to measure progress toward the goal with metrics. Let's move onto discussing metrics.
What is Your GAMEplan? Did You Accomplish Your Goal?
Metrics help you determine if you're moving toward your goals or not. They help you answer whether you've accomplished your goals or not.
As you setup your GAMEplan, you'll need to schedule a time at the end of the month to assess the past month and then create a new GAMEplan for the next month.
You'll also need to schedule time to accomplish the actions items. A good way to complete these is using the Pomodoro technique.
There are many ways you can err with the GAMEplan, but don't stress it too much because you'll never achieve perfection. Keep striving to get better.
You may have overly ambitious goals or far-too-easily-achievable goals. Your actions items may not have moved you toward your goals or far less than you thought. You may have put too much on your plate (or not enough).
Keep developing ambitious goals, pursue them with actions you believe will accomplish them, and measure them with metrics. Then execute and assess.
What is your GAMEplan?
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Business Economics: Know the Health of Your Business
You cannot go off how you feel about your business to know if your business is doing well. The reality is real, and if you fail to know the economic realities of your business, the economic realities will confront you when abject failure slaps you in the face.
It's okay, though. Even if the metrics are bad or trending in the wrong direction, have a true, clear picture helps you identify problems and where you need to put your energy and effort to turn things around.
If your waist goes up month after month, you're getting unhealthier, whether you're measuring it or not.
These metrics give you an objective measuring standard to assess your business' health.
Business Economics: Metrics that Matter for Your Business
Matt goes through each metric one-by-one. First, though, here are the metrics, organized into macroeconomic or business-level and microeconomic or unit-level.
Business Economics: Macroeconomic Metrics that Matter
The first and easiest metric to calculate is top line revenue. This is the money that is coming in over a period of time, typically calculated monthly (and eventually quarterly and annually – though quarterly and annual numbers matter more for larger businesses).
Whether you're looking at Stripe, ACH, the business bank account, this is simply calculating all the incoming money in a month.
The cost of goods is the cost to produce the good itself. So, for producing a product, this is the cost of materials you purchase that go into the item and costs such as shipping. For a service business such as Barbell Logic, this looks like the pay to the 1099 contractor coaches per client.
You calculate gross margin or gross profit by subtracting the cost of goods from top line revenue.
Next, you need to identify operating expenses. These are things that are required for the business but not directly related to producing the individual service or good. This might be payroll for full-time employees, printer ink, paying for a new computer, squat racks, or taking a client to lunch.
The last critical business-level metric to determine is your net profit. You calculate this by subtracting your operating expenses from your gross profit. This is truly how much money the business is making each month.
If you're a one-man team, then you get paid from this. If you lose money, you don't get paid. As the owner or CEO, though, while you get paid last you also get fired last.
Business Economics: Microeconomic Metrics that Matter
Calculate your churn rate. This is the percentage of clients you lose each month. The retention rate is the opposite (100% – churn rate).
Next note your number of subscribers. Matt says subscribers, because a customer who makes a one-time purchase (a one-time coaching session or purchases one widget) does not lead you to know what your recurring revenue is. You don't have recurring revenue in this situation.
Next know your average ticket price. What are your subscribers paying each month on average.
The number of subscribers multiplied by average ticked price equals your monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
An important statistic to calculate is your lifetime value of client (LTV – especially at gross margin).
The first thing you need to do is calculate the average customer lifespan. Divide 100 by the churn rate. So, for example, if you have 10% churn your average customer lifespan is 10 months. Below are more business economics metrics.
MRR x average customer lifespan = LTV (at gross revenue)
LTV (at gross revenue) x gross margin = LTV (at gross revenue)
Calculate your customer acquisition cost (CAC) by adding together all efforts to acquire customers. This includes marketing, sales, ads, and content you produce to market (e.g. you create a weekly newsletter, podcast, or maintain a YouTube channel).
The CAC:LTV ratio is important. 1:2 ratio is considered unhealthy or unsustainable. 1:3 is considered healthy.
If your ratio is significantly less than 1:3 (e.g. 1:28) you should likely spend more money to acquire customers.
These are the metrics that matter to your business. These are your business economics.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Excellent Customer Service for Online Coaching (Not Just In-Person) Customer service sets your business apart. Many coaches and gyms provide excellent customer service. Matt sees three common gym types: boutique gyms with excellent customer service but poor training, black iron or CrossFit gyms with hard training but poor customer service, and big box gyms that have good customer service with laissez faire training (you can train hard or not). Coaches who follow something akin to Barbell Logic coaching, with high-quality, 1-on-1 coaching, know how to provide an excellent customer service: show up on time, be prepared, greet your client with enthusiasm even if you're in a bad mood, dress well, etc. You need to have excellent customer service for online coaching. Don't treat your online coaching differently. Take the principle of high-quality, high-touch coaching and apply it to your online coaching business. Excellent Customer Service for Online Coaching: Set & Maintain a High Standard How can you set and maintain a high standard of service for your online coaching business. Look at the list below for some basic things:
Think about the online coaching experience like you would the in-person experience. As opposed to your client walking into the gym, how does the client interact with you, receive feedback, upload videos, ask questions? How do they pay? Can they expect consistent, high-quality customer service from you?
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Why You Should Take a Vacation – Reset & Relax
Life naturally contains cycles.
You stress yourself in the gym, then you rest to allow recovery and adaptation to occur. Without the rest, there is no adaptation. Without the stress, there is no adaptation. Both contribute to the goal: improvement toward your goal.
After day comes night. Following the cold of winter, comes the blooming and growth of spring, the heat of summer, and the harvest that leads back into winter.
Traditionally, many religions have times of fasting and feasting – and the largest feasts are often preceded by the severest fasts.
If you overreach in training, you deload. Even within a workout, you can lift more weight between sets or run harder on an interval only after you have rested.
We cannot, as humans, grind all the time. It is inhuman.
Why You Should Take a Vacation – Tyranny of the Urgent
You need times to overcome the tyranny of the urgent and prioritize the important.
This includes working "on the business, not in the business." It also includes spending time with friends and family, self-improvement and professional development, leisure and exercise.
Business people and artists build time to allow thoughts to arise in their minds. This may be a daily walk, weekly "no cell phone" days, or quarterly or annual retreats.
Just as we cannot and will not become strong if we were to decide to start a workout today and never end it (sets until you die), neither can we work with sleep, food, leisure, and rest.
Why you should take a vacation (or a walk, a retreat, a break, a day without social media, celebrate a holiday or feast): because you're human.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Automated Metrics Are Awesome – PRs Matter
PRs matter because PRs measure progress toward your or your clients' goals. They let you know you're on the right track (or they indicate a change is needed).
You first must develop goals based on your deep motivations and values. Then, decide on metrics that align with this goal. If these metrics increase – if you hit PRs – you are moving closer toward your goals.
Over time, you'll need to reassess your goals and PRs. You may get injured or reach a point where all-time, outright PRs are behind you (no more 1RMs). This is okay.
What you'll have to do is create new PRs to track. Maybe you track PRs after 40. You could track PRs at your lighter weight. Tracking volume PRs, consistency PRs, PRs at different rep & set schemes, or PRs for accessory or supplemental lifts could help you assess progress toward your goals.
Ultimately, PRs motivate clients and measure progress toward goals, indicating if you and your client are on the right path, or you need to change something.
Automated Metrics Are Awesome – Efficient & Effective
Don't go out of your way to remember client PRs – track them automatically. How?
TurnKey Coach automatically tracks PRs across different rep and set schemes, for conditioning, and for consistency. As you provide video feedback, the PRs appear on the screen at the top. It's the first thing to notice and celebrate with your client.
In your programming, you can scroll through PRs for a certain lift and aim for a PR that is there for the taking. For example, a client's last 1RM and 5RM were all-out, RPE 10 grinders. The client, though, may not have gone for a 3RM for a long time. Instead of trying to eke out a small 1RM or 5RM PR that might not be there, go for the easier 3RM PR.
Automated metrics are awesome.
PS - Coach Smarter, Earn More: https://bit.ly/3X4ixOX Matt's Links Website: https://ryanmattreynolds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reynoldsstrong/?hl=en Chris's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreynolds/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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