Stay ConnectedWe’ve already helped 3,000 gym owners become more profitable, and we’re the #1 gym mentorship program in the world.
This channel (presented by Two-Brain Business) is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. We provide actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms.
In the gym business, a client's first 90 days are critical.
Do a great job onboarding a new client and you'll likely have an opportunity to change a person's life over a period of years. Do a poor job and your new member might be gone in weeks or months, likely never to return to a gym.
To help more people and build a great business, you must have a precise plan to set new clients up for long-term success.
In this episode, Two-Brain Business founder and CEO Chris Cooper maps out the exact onboarding process in place at his gym, Catalyst Fitness. Coop will walk you through the operations documents his staff members use to onboard new clients so you understand the entire client journey, including key touch points, measurements and milestones, opportunities for positive reinforcement, and much more.
If you want to dramatically improve your gym business quickly, create a client journey and invest time to ensure the first 90 days are perfect. If you do, your members will improve their health and fitness and your business will thrive.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
1:30 – 1. Intro and assessment
6:08 – 2. Admit and Affirm
9:40 - 3. Activate and Acclimate
15:40 - 4. Accomplish
18:59 - 5. Adopt and advocate
22:20 – Ongoing retention
Is your negative attitude pushing away potential gym clients? Are you turning off your members with social-media rants?
Are you trying to impress clients with random fitness knowledge instead of actually listening to people? Do you let the stress of entrepreneurship show in public? Do people think you're more interested in your cell phone than what they're saying?
Being likable is incredibly important. You can be the best trainer in the world, but you won't have any clients if people don't want to be around you.
Good news: You can become more likable by reducing stress, cultivating positivity and committing to self-improvement.
In this episode, Chris Cooper and Mike Warkentin reflect on their own mistakes and share the lessons they've learned about how to be more likable to those they serve.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
The CALM Model: How to Lead in a Crisis
Chris Cooper's 10 Tips for Being More Likable
Don't Be a Jerk of a Gym Owner
1:33 - Stop complaining and shaming
5:20 - Social-media traps
9:23 - Why you're unlikable
14:29 - Hire likable staff
18:49 - Find an objective place to vent
21:20 - How mentorship helps
Every year, the Two-Brain Summit brings together hundreds of gym owners and coaches for an epic weekend of learning and action, connection and motivation.
It's not a sit-and-listen conference. This is an immersive experience for fitness professionals who are ready to do the work and take their careers and businesses to the next level.
In this episode, Chris Cooper gives you the lowdown on featured speakers—including Jason Khalipa and Dan Martell—and some special bonuses, including NCFIT workouts and a mix-and-mingle cocktail hour.
Here's what's up for gym owners:
Connect—Chris Cooper
Buy Back Your Time—Dan Martell
Virtuosity in Business—Jason Khalipa
The Wealthy Gym Owner and Team—Shawn Rider
Connect Your Goals With the Players—Karl Solberg
The Link Between Content and Sales—John Franklin
Growing and Retaining Staff—Joleen Bingham
Legendary Leadership—Andrea Savard
Entrepreneurial Maturity—Bonnie Skinner
Goal Reviews: Simple Structure and Process—Karen Hazelton
How to Zero in Your Focus Every Day—Taryn Dubreuil
The lineup for fitness coaches and trainers:
Connecting Powerful Moments—Peter Brasovan
Spartan/DEKA—Yancy Culp
How to Get Clients to Follow Our Advice—Colm O'Reilly
Having Hard Conversations—Brian Strump
Coaching Kids—The Brand X Method
Coach Development: Moving From 7 to 10—Jason Khalipa
Perfect Nutrition Client Avatars—Anastasia Bennett
Habits-Based Nutrition—Cynthia Fotti
Semi-Private Training—Brian Bott
Hundreds of the world's best gym owners and coaches will be in Chicago, Illinois, from June 3 to 4. Join us!
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
Summit tickets
1:49 - Day 1 speaker lineup
11:50 - Day 2 speaker lineup
20:09 - Taking action
20:59 - Special features
You know the scenario: An athletic gym owner spends a lot of time training for fitness competitions.
So what happens to the business? Does it lumber along and eventually crumble because the owner's attention is elsewhere? Or can some owners divide their focus and achieve competition goals while building thriving businesses?
Chris Cooper digs into the question today with the help of two gym-owning athletes.
Two-Brain mentor Taryn Dubreuil runs CrossFit Function and says "competition" is her middle name. She narrowly missed qualifying for the CrossFit Games back in the day and still trains hard for other competitions.
Travis Mayer has competed in the CrossFit Games eight times, he owns CrossFit UNTD, and he's got four kids.
Taryn and Travis chat with Coop to give their perspective on building a great business and achieving personal athletic goals. As you can imagine, time management is critical.
What do you think? Can a gym owner compete and build a great business at the same time?
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
1:27 - Stress
4:13 - Taryn Dubreuil's story
8:59- Time management
16:25 - Case study
21:20 - Travis Mayer's story
26:14 - Balance
34:47 - Advice: staff and systems
40:09 - Delegation and staffing
If you wanted to kill your gym, what would you do?
This can be a helpful question to ask yourself.
Here's why: Your answers will highlight paths you should avoid at all costs, and you might even discover you're actually doing some things that are hurting your business. From there, you can make corrections, take new actions and double-down on tactics that are actually driving growth.
In this episode, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper does the exercise himself and reveals the four things he would do if he wanted to stop growth dead at his gym. Get this: Chris absentmindedly did all four things at some point during his early career as a gym owner.
Review Coop's list, make your own, then focus on the actions that will measurably improve your gym business fast.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
0:47 - Turn off media and marketing
2:23 - Repel people
5:24 - Abdicate responsibility
7:35 - Stop focusing on retention
Darren Thornton owns Defy Functional Fitness, where he's worked hard to generate average revenue per member of more than USD$370 per month.
That earned him a place on Two-Brain's Top 10 leaderboard for February 2023.
In this episode, Darren spills his secrets. He'll talk about what he offers at his business in Toronto, Canada, and why his clients find it so valuable.
Get this: Darren doesn't spend a ton of money on marketing. But his gym is full of high-value clients because he uses a tried-and-tested referral strategy that generates hot leads regularly. His closing rate for sales? It's an incredible 80 percent.
If your average revenue per member could use a boost, Darren and host Mike Warkentin have a few things you can start doing right now to drive the number up.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
5:05 - Prescriptions and fundamentals
11:15 - Adding personal training
22:46 - Affinity Marketing
27:05 - Things you can do today to improve ARM
A gym that averages $812 per client per month?
You read that right. Two-Brain's top performers posted incredible average revenue per member (ARM) scores in February 2023 .
Everyone in the Top 10 was above $370, and the No. 1 gym was over $800.
In this episode, Chris Cooper goes over the leaderboard and then shares the secrets of the top gym owners. Some started using onboarding programs, while others increased rates, ran challenges or added small-group training. Regardless of the exact plan, all of our leaders focused on creating huge value for their clients.
Can you get similar results at your gym? Yes! Chris will give you a few tactics you can employ today to serve your clients better and earn more.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
1:12 - ARM leaderboard
5:32 - Perspective: your ARM
5:59 - Advice from the Top 5
14:30 - Key takeaways
Chad and Esther Pinther were able to turn their gym around and supercharge their earnings with the help of a Two-Brain Business mentor.
Chad at one time supported his fitness business with money from his modeling career—he's appeared in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Stetson, Patrick James and more. When the Pinthers wanted to shore up the gym business so they could spend more time together as a family, they started working with a mentor.
The results were dramatic.
The two increased gross revenue significantly, but they also increased net owner benefit—what they take home from the business. In fact, the Pinthers earned a spot on Two-Brain's January 2023 leaderboard for owner earnings. Everyone in the Top 10 earned an average of at least US$16,000 a month over a three-month period, and the Top 5 gym owners all averaged $20,000 a month.
In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," Chad explains how mentorship helped him create a profitable business that allows him to live the life he wants.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
3:34 - Scarcity to Profit First mindset
9:31 - Making projections
13:33 - The turning point
18:09 - Mentorship to help steer the ship
21:06 - Creating value and charging accordingly
29:06 - Increasing average revenue per member
41:48 - Chad's advice to other gym owners
What's your gym worth? How do you calculate the true value?
Chris Cooper has the answer, and he'll tell you how to come up with a hard number in this edition of "Run a Profitable Gym."
In some cases, owners won't like the final number. If you're burned out, run down and out of cash, it can be tempting to just sell the gym. But you could be missing out on cash if you put it on the block right away.
Good news: Chris has seven steps to make your gym more valuable. You can use them whether you want to sell or keep your gym (we hope you keep it). But if you really want to offload your gym, it's best to have a business that's worth selling, and you can add significant value in just six months with a mentor's help.
But get this: Many struggling owners who improve their gyms before sale discover that the revitalized businesses are actually worth keeping.
Whatever your situation is right now, it helps to know what your gym is worth and how you can increase that number—whether you want to sell or build a strong, stable business that becomes a cash-flow asset.
Links
Rigquipment Gym-valuation tool
"How to Sell a Gym" guide
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
0:39 - How to value a gym
4:59 - 7 steps to increase gym value
13:20 - How mentorship can help
15:38 - Coop's story—raising rates
Is your website bringing you clients or pushing them away?
Bad news: A recent audit revealed 80 percent of gyms have subpar websites that don't encourage clients to buy.
This is a huge problem. A poor website multiplies your losses. If you're spending money on ads, you're wasting it. And if you're lucky enough to generate organic traffic with sound SEO tactics, those people are clicking out without engaging.
In this episode, Two-Brain Business CMO and Kilo co-founder John Franklin walks you through the "5-second test" you should perform on your gym website today. He'll also show you how to audit your website using the "ABC method."
A stands for the "above the fold" section, also referred to as a website's "hero section." That's the stuff you see right when you land on a page. It needs to be clear and direct.
B is for "below the fold." That's the stuff people see when they scroll. You need a brief description of your core service, social proof and a secondary call to action.
C stands for "clear directions on how to start." Visitors should know exactly what to do if they want to take the next step.
Review your gym website today, then take steps to ensure it's helping your business grow.
Links
Book a Call
Gym Owners United
3:20 - The 5-second gym website test
8:20 - What you need "above the fold"
13:48 - Below-the-fold essentials
17:38 - The secondary call to action
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
