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.
Could your gym survive without you? Not just for a weekend getaway, but for the long haul? If you don't have systems in place, the answer is "probably not."
Without systems in place, everything falls to you, from cleaning the bathrooms to closing sales. And although your ego might like that, it doesn't work in real life.
Here's Chris Cooper on the least sexy—but most critical—aspect of gym ownership.
Links:
Gym Lead Machine
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
Free Tools
Timeline:
2:14 – Systems keep things from falling in the cracks.
4:43 – Systems save you from exhaustion and burnout.
6:32 – Without systems, you’ll end up doing everything.
8:18 – Systems will help you generate more revenue.
9:24 – Systems mean consistency.
12:02 – Systems protect your business for the long term.
13:03 – Where to learn how to set up great systems.
At Two-Brain Business, our goal is to make a million entrepreneurs wealthy. We define wealth as freedom of time and finances, and that's exactly what Andrew and Mary Boimila have achieved.
Andrew and Mary are the winners of the sought-after Two-Brain Owner Lifestyle Award. They've demonstrated they can take time away from their business—and still get paid—while the business runs itself. They set clear goals for themselves and their business, and they achieved them.
Here's how they did it.
Links:
Tradewinds Health & Fitness
AGuard
Arbox
Gym Owners United
Timeline:
0:22 – The Owner Lifestyle Award.
3:35 – Tradewinds, pre-Two-Brain.
5:21 – Envisioning goals.
7:39 – Evolving the business and building the right team.
9:18 – Figuring out what’s important.
10:54 – Building a “joyous, happy” team.
14:12 – Staying strong during the COVID shutdown.
16:57 – Providing rockstar customer service.
18:31 – Content creation during COVID.
19:44 – Building a business that will last.
22:20 – Words of wisdom to those who feel stuck.
"Never miss a crisis."
Why? Because every crisis is an opportunity, whether it's to learn, improve or even start all over.
Here, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper shares the lessons he's learned from the COVID crisis—lessons that can help you become antifragile and emerge from this pandemic stronger than ever.
Links:
Forever Fierce
Wodify
Contact:
chris@twobrainbusiness.com
Timeline:
3:03 – What the data says about gyms and the COVID crisis.
6:40 – Watch out for false gurus.
8:48 – The gyms that survived the COVID crisis vs. the ones that didn’t.
12:11 – The Prescriptive Model: The key to survival.
14:36 – Never miss a crisis.
17:31 – What effective crisis leadership really looks like.
21:43 – When downsizing is a good thing.
22:49 – Investing in mentorship during crisis.
26:38 – Forced to focus on what matters most.
31:09 – Discovering resilience.
Good nutrition is key to getting results for your clients, and prepping meals ahead of time is a great way to keep them on track. But how do you get them to do it?
Fitness expert and author Michelle Vodrazka joined Tiffy Thompson to talk about how to make meal prep easy and accessible for your clients.
You'll learn how to get your clients started meal prepping for the week as well as great tips and tricks for keeping it fun and simple so they'll stay in the kitchen and away from the drive-thru.
Links:
Michelle Vodrazka
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
Driven Nutrition
Gym Owners United
Timeline:
3:02 – How to start meal prepping: Pick your prep day(s).
4:52 – Pick your recipes.
6:35 – Make it fun.
10:41 – What coaches can do to get clients to meal prep.
13:13 – Give them simple tools.
15:00 – Hacks to make meal prep even easier.
17:39 – Staying motivated during difficult times.
21:34 – Meal prep doesn’t have to be intimidating.
COVID has hit kids' fitness bad. No more gym class. No more sports. No more recess.
Meanwhile, parents are dealing with increasingly antsy children forced to spend hours each day trying to pay attention to Zoom classes.
But there's another option—your gym. If your gym is open, you have the perfect opportunity to help kids get the physical activity they need while also expanding your business.
Jeff and Mikki Martin are the founders of the Brand X Method, the industry's premier youth coaching education course. Here, they joined Chris Cooper to talk about how to find and train great youth trainers and how you can use this post-COVID period to expand your reach to kids who need fitness now more than ever.
Links:
The Brand X Method
The Professional Youth Coach Certification
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
Forever Fierce
Contact:
info@thebrandxmethod.com
Timeline:
1:42 – Developing Brand X.
7:40 – The decline of physical literacy in kids.
12:22 – COVID’s effect on kids’ physical literacy.
16:15 – So you need a kids program. Where do you start?
21:27 – How to find the right person to lead your kids program.
25:35 – How to train your kids coaches, and what the PYCC entails.
27:35 – “Kids trainers should be the best-educated trainers in the world.”
30:58 – What the online PYCC brings to the table that in-person training doesn’t.
33:55 – The opportunity at your doorstep.
Staffing a gym is tough.
Some employees underperform. Others are highly qualified but underpaid. Both situations lead to churn and leave you, the owner, drowning in work and unable to move your business forward.
But what if you could do things differently? By taking a mentorship approach to staffing and helping your team members become intrapreneurs in your business, you can give them sustainable, satisfying careers while simultaneously strengthening your business and moving toward your Perfect Day.
Certified Two-Brain Mentor Jeff Burlingame has done it. Here's how you can, too.
Links:
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
Driven Nutrition
How to Get the Right People in the Right Roles at Your Gym
Free Tools
Timeline:
1:29 – The conventional and disappointing career arc of the fitness professional.
6:54 – Why staff retention is critical.
8:58 – Overqualified, underpaid.
11:39 – There’s another way: intrapreneurialism.
14:59 – Career mapping intrapreneurial paths for your employees.
19:24 – How intrapreneurialism benefits your staff and brings your business more value.
23:59 – How Jeff elevated his staff and removed himself from the business.
30:17 – How developing your staff members’ careers can give you more energy and momentum.
37:50 – One easy thing you can do today to help push your staff members’ careers forward.
Do you avoid feedback like you avoid checking your bank account?
Well, you shouldn't avoid either, but today, we're talking about client feedback—and the good kind requires more than an anonymous survey.
Here, Chris Cooper explains exactly what you have to gain by picking up the phone and talking to your members.
Links:
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
Arbox
Gym Owners United
Timeline:
2:45 – Why you shouldn’t always listen to the squeakiest wheel.
3:37 – What you should ask your clients.
6:15 – Building relationships and improving your business: Two birds, one stone.
9:00 – Why you shouldn’t fear feedback.
10:30 – How you can use feedback to put your clients on a pedestal.
Your staff can make or break your business—and that means your hiring process can, too.
What's more important in a potential staff member: experience or personality? How can you tell if someone will gel with your team? What are the red flags to watch out for?
Certified Two-Brain Mentor Laurie Drummond has been staffing Ultra CrossFit for seven years, and she's honed the hiring process to an art. In this episode, she answers the questions above and shares key interview tactics to help you make the right hiring decisions.
Links:
Ultra CrossFit
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
Gym Lead Machine
When No One Sees Your Vision (And It's all Your Fault) with Kaleda Connell
Done-for-You Hiring Plan and Job Descriptions
Register for the Two-Brain Summit 2020
Timeline:
1:49 – How learning to hire well helped Laurie turn her gym from hobby to business.
4:37 – Credentials or personality?
5:17 – Engage in some light stalking.
8:57 – Two-Brain’s done-for-you hiring plan.
9:52 – Hiring for persona and mapping the staff journey.
13:34 – Thoughts, feelings and potential barriers.
18:09 – Red flags to avoid.
22:40 – Staff as a representation of your business.
26:39 – Matching new hires with your mission, vision and morals.
29:13 – The casual coffee chat.
31:32 – Reading vibes in the first interview.
40:09 – The tough interview questions you need to ask.
43:25 – Dealing with barriers.
46:46 – Everyone is replaceable—including you.
It's a pattern you know well: A client starts at your gym, makes progress and is committed and enthusiastic. But after a while, the progress slows. The enthusiasm fizzles. So how do you keep clients engaged for the long haul?
That's just one of the things Nathan Holiday designed the Level Method to accomplish. This systematic approach to assessment and goal setting incentivizes clients to stay the course by pairing quantifiable metrics of progress with goal setting and accountability.
Here, Nathan joins Chris Cooper to talk about how the program can help clients get better results and help gym owners improve client retention.
Links:
Level Method
AGuard
Wodify
Register for the Two-Brain Summit 2020
Timeline:
1:06 – Why test skills if a client doesn’t care about them?
2:23 – The value of regular assessments.
6:01 – Connecting long-term goals to short-term achievements.
10:50 – Systematizing ongoing assessment.
15:18 – The bridge between assessment and results.
19:04 – Structuring assessment: global vs. individual reviews.
24:06 – How often should you test?
28:07 – How to get clients to do goal reviews.
There are a million things you can do to make your gym business better, but all too often, paralysis by analysis means you do nothing at all—or do everything poorly.
That's why we created the #unbreakable55 challenge: Do one thing per day, five days per week, for 55 weeks. The tasks are simple—but not easy—and at the end of the 55 days, your business will be stronger.
Listen to Chris Cooper explain the challenge here, then join the #unbreakable55.
Links:
Incite Tax: Profit First for Microgyms
#Unbreakable55
AGuard
Join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook
Register for the Two-Brain Summit 2020
Contact:
chris@twobrainbusiness.com
Timeline:
1:21 – What is the unbreakable55 challenge?
3:55 – How to get clients to do a goal-review session.
5:47 – Publishing content means more than an Instagram post.
8:49 – How to implement a process improvement.
11:14 – Ways to praise staff members.
12:28 – How to talk to new people about your business.
15:07 – Why the unbreakble55 challenge works.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
