Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
Parkour Gym Owner & Mentor Backflips Into Profitability
Who’s my target market? How many class options should I offer? How much should I charge?
These are questions all gym owners must ask, no matter what type of gym they run.
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper dives into these topics with Jimmy Davidson, a parkour athlete turned gym owner and mentor.
Jimmy owns a three-location parkour gym, Freedom in Motion, and he’s a coach at Motion Mentors, a mentoring practice for parkour businesses.
By dialing in on his key demographic and offering programs his market wants, Jimmy has grown his gyms to nearly $1 million in revenue per location. Now, he’s on a mission to achieve his goal of helping 1 million people learn parkour.
Whether you own a CrossFit gym, a parkour gym or anything in between, tune in to learn proven strategies for overcoming some of the most common challenges gym owners face.
Links
Motion Mentors
Gym Owners United
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2:02 - Parkour vs. ninja gyms
5:30 - Why open a gym?
16:32 - Problems for parkour gyms
19:37 - Low prices hurt your gym
25:37 - Parkour level system
Jimmy Davidson, welcome to Run a Profitable Gym.
Speaker 2:Hey Chris, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it's been a while . So what we're gonna start with today, before we get into your parkour story and your parkour gyms and what Motion mentors is, is what the hell is parkour?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so parkour is a type of martial art , but instead of fighting, it's a martial art movement. So you would see athletes learning how to climb over walls, you know, vault over obstacles, land safely, roll basically a , a park where athlete can go in pretty much any direction from where they're starting from quickly, efficiently, and safely. And it's specifically is tailored to what you would find out in the, you know, real life outdoor environment. That way it's practical and useful and , uh, that's why it's also a martial art.
Speaker 1:I've never heard it called a martial art before. That's really cool. Now, did parkour have its origins in free running , or do I have those two reversed?
Speaker 2:Uh , war came first and then free running came later on. Um, when, you know, this dude named Sebastian Fuka , who was part of the original founders of Park War coming out of, of Paris, when flips and more acrobatics, less efficient things started being added, free running was coined just to sort of be, you know, an inclusive term for that , uh, that way it wasn't just strictly like you have to train like a martial artist, you have to be like militaristic about it. But nowadays, modern parkour , um, you know, at least here in the States, we don't really use the word free running that that might differ depending on your specific region, but most parkour people just say it's all parkour flips included.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is run a profitable gym. And if you're a gym owner listening to this and you're saying, okay, I I don't run a parkour gym or a , I'm not really super interested in learning parkour myself, I'm gonna tell you why you should be listening to this because Jimmy and other parkour gyms do millions of dollars in revenue every single year. And we're gonna get into the nitty gritty of that. Jimmy's actually a mentor for motion mentors, and he works to help other parkour gyms grow their business. Jimmy, before we get into like the nuts and bolts of what is a parkour gym, can you just differentiate parkour from Ninja Gyms, which are, they seem to be kind of the Disneyfied version of, of parkour maybe, or maybe I'm wrong, but they're cropping up in a lot of cities around North America especially.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it , it kind of goes down to the fundamental difference between parkour and Ninja Warrior training parkour. If you look at it as an umbrella term, it can refer to really any discipline involving how you move your body and move through space. So like, if you wanna get really technical, you know, like dance or even swimming, like could be parkour arguably, but really, you know, like it's climbing over walls, moving through space , uh, efficiently and with speed. Um, but Ninja Warrior, ninja Warrior is within Park War, but Ninja Warrior itself cannot fully define what Park War is because Ninja Warrior, when you zoom into it , uh, it's very niche obstacles that are, you know , manmade. And by that I mean , uh, specifically designed for the sport. So if you go outside and train parkour, you're not gonna find like giant inflatable bungees or spinning, spinning things you have to grab onto or else you fall into like water. That would be a probably a way more fun designed to city, but just not <laugh> , not how humans do it. And that's why like, they're different fundamentally, philosophically, but then when you go into a parkour gym versus a Ninja Warrior gym, a Ninja Warrior gym while still super fun, is typically a predetermined course that the athletes go through. They're predetermined obstacles and predetermined challenges, whereas if Parkour Gym is much more of like a 360 open space, and although there are like set obstacles that, you know, a parkour athlete might expect to see like different shapes of blocks and bars and things, there's no one way to, you know, overcome any of the obstacles. In fact, you can, you can make up your own moves as you go. You can make up your own pathways as you go. So it's very freestyle and very freeform.
Speaker 1:What does the inside of a parkour gym look like? Paint us that picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so if you walked into one of my park or gyms and, and they're called Freedom in Motion, and we have three of 'em right now , you would walk into, it's almost like a three dimensional rock climbing course. You know, there's platforms, there's stuff on the walls, there's bars to swing off of. Um, there's a lot of movable objects, so some are like big larger things that you would need multiple people to move around. And those are like big kind of tubular platforms. Uh, other ones are, you know, smaller. One person can move it just , uh, like trapezoidal, we call 'em vaulting blocks and you can arrange them all however you want. If you're a coach, you can kind of customize your class for the day and make whatever courses you want to. And then there's even like little smaller obstacles, like ground level balancing rails to help new athletes just learn how to balance at all safely. Um, and there's, there's a lot of like, care paid to what the beginner's experience would be, you know, so there's a lot of approachable, a lot of easy, a lot of like DIY obstacle courses that you can create or a coach can create for you. Yeah, it's <laugh> . Any, any parkour athlete would know that parkour is much easier to show than it is to tell.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll get some photos up here for the, for the YouTube video for sure. And so if you're listening to this on a podcast, if you pop over to the Run a Profitable Gym YouTube channel, you could see some of these photos of Jimmy's gym, which is awesome. What made you wanna open a gym instead of continuing to be a parkour coach or athlete? Jimmy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was originally a professional parkour athlete. I was on what was regarded at that time as like the American, you know, team. There was a company called American Core . I was, I was on their team and , uh, while traveling around the country doing performance and things, when I was back at home, I had just a ton of private lesson students and our community in, in Temecula, California. Man, we had like a hundred plus people that, that were in network . If we threw a a , an event like 50 plus people would show up. And, and that's a lot for, you know, this is back in 2011 when no one knew about parkour even sooner. We started in 2007 actually. So at a certain point I just had a bunch of students that I was teaching and the first ever couple of Park War gyms had begun popping up around the world. Uh , you know, the first one that I was aware of was in Seattle, Washington, and then a popular one popped up in la Uh, and, you know, I was 19 at the time outta high school and just wondering what I'm gonna do with my life and figured, well, I'm already doing this, so let's figure out how to , how to start a parkour park or a parkour gym. And , um, before actually landing on Parkour gym, I approached the city of Temecula's mayor at the time, and keep in mind, I'm 19, so I, I had a , uh, at the time I was 19, I had this like really adorable binder, like my school binder with <laugh> printed out What ? Yeah. Printed out images of like, this is what a parkour session looks like. This is my type up of what parkour is, you know, just all on like at home computer paper. And I showed it to our mayor at the time and he looked through it, he humored me and at the end of the meeting he just looked at me and he is like, I don't know what this is. I've never heard of Park War. Sounds like a liability nightmare. Uh, the city will not have a public park, war park, like a skate park, even though they exist in other parts of the country. And he just advised that I do it on my own in a private sector. So I went home and looked up, what the heck does private sector mean? Like, oh, it just means you open up your own gym. And , uh, after the races, and maybe two years later, we opened our first gym in Murrieta, California in 2014.
Speaker 1:That's cool. And, and that gym now does well over a million in revenue, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So the, the , our whole network of gyms, we have three right now. Our goal for this year is to get to 3 million in revenue. So that's each individual, Jim, you know, we're trying to get it to that 1 million mark. So they're just under that now, but we are on our way.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. So Jimmy, a lot of people who listen to this podcast, as you know, they're around a third to half of that in a , in a year for gross revenue. Let's start there. Like why does the average gym owner need to pay attention to this? What are they missing that parkour gyms are doing really, really well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one thing I wanna point out is parkour gyms on average don't service the same target audience as like a CrossFit gym. Parkour gyms on average are working with kids, you know, typically ages 12 to 13 or so. And, and the parents are really the person paying, whereas a typical CrossFit gym, you're working directly with the, the adult athletes. Whether or not you have a kids program at , you know, the kids program at the parkour gym most of the time is the bread and butter. So that's kinda the main thing to get. And I would say maybe on both sides of this equation, whether you're across the gym owner or you know, whatever fitness or parkour or anything working with kids, if you started as the athlete and you open the gym as the athlete, I've noticed that a lot of times the entrepreneur athlete doesn't take that transition from going from, I open this box because it's my passion, I open this box with my friends and I'm servicing my friends. There's seldom that transition from that starting point to, okay, I need to get out of the coach, I need to climb the value ladder, I need to learn how to actually run a team, how to actually make sales, the psychology of sales. Yeah . You know , Chris is shaking his head big time come
Speaker 1:Off Yeah . On the video here ,
Speaker 2:<laugh> . Yeah. And so making that transition from athlete to gym owner and then from gym owner to like real entrepreneur, you know, working on the business, building the teams underneath that and, and getting to the higher rungs of the value ladder time and time again, whether it's a park or gym or not, that seems to be the fundamental key that needs to be dived in on discussed. We need to figure out exactly where that business owner is, you know, what, what rung are they on, maybe even stuck on, and how to get them methodically to the next rung and the next level.
Speaker 1:Let's start there. So, you know, one problem that I had was I thought that I was my own best client, like the target demographic was me forgetting that I was broke, noisy, messy, loud, like the worst customer that I could ever ask for. What do you suggest to somebody who's opening up any kind of gym ? How do they get outta that mindset that they are their own best customer?
Speaker 2:They get out of that mindset of they are your own best customer, man, there's two ways that I see the more painful and more common way is trial by fire. You show up, you build it, and you realize just because you built it, they don't come
Speaker 1:<laugh>. Yep .
Speaker 2:Guilty . You know, that happened to me for sure. And, and there comes this point where, you know, you're servicing people like you, you're servicing your friends and eventually your friends, especially let's say, you know, they move on, they five years passes, they move away, they get , you know, they start their family just, their lives change. And then you're kind of left with whoever's left over . And a lot of times those remaining people who fit that demo demographic just aren't paying your bills. Maybe they're showing up for open gym or drop-in, or they're occasionally coming just for the community and the culture, but they may be paying like, geez , like 20% if you're lucky of the total revenue you need just to keep the lights on. And so then there comes this sort of, you know, come to Jesus moment of like, you know, these other clients that I have, so in my park board gym, these parents with these kids, they are actually paying our bills. And me the entrepreneur, I need to like pivot to servicing them and I need to make them my focus and then provide a space around that for the community to come into and, you know, to, to make it fulfill that need. But, so that's the trial. By fire, you, you fail, you realize it's not working, and then you discover how to pivot. And obviously the faster way is you get a mentor, someone who is in the space, who's seen this before, who can, you know, discuss with you right here and now, what challenges you're facing. And then they can just open up their plethora of experience and stories and just point out to you without the pain and trial by fire. Like, this is where you're going, this is where you could go, here's the options I see for you. And they lay out a path.
Speaker 1:When did you realize, hey, my target market is actually kids, it's not dudes like me in their twenties.
Speaker 2:Yeah, <laugh>, when did I realize it's different than when did I fully take that on as the truth? You know ,
Speaker 1:<laugh> ? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, when did I realize pretty early on, maybe 20 14, 20 15, first year or two, we just started getting a lot of interest. A lot of parents coming in and , and those were the people signing up. So it was pretty obvious for us pretty pretty early on. But it wasn't until , uh, doing the seed client exercise, which I first heard from Mike Malowitz of just like, and, and for those of you who don't know , the seed client exercise in a nutshell is you take the top 10 people who are your best clients in terms of revenue, and then you, and you write that down on a list. Uh, the next list you take the top 10 people of clients who you just love working with the most. And a lot of times people will show up on both lists. They're paying you the most and you love working with them, and those are your seed clients. And if you really dive in and analyze that and you optimize your gym for those seed clients, you optimize for people who are paying you the most and who you love working with the most. And the really awesome flip side of that is the people who hardly pay you or maybe who just like really don't work with your gym's culture, they are, they're not weeded out, they're just like not planned for it . And then they self-select out, you know, and you're, you end up with this really great product, this great experience and something that for you as the business owner feels good and doesn't constantly burn you out.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about how you made that transition, because I think a lot of people get that conceptually, okay, my seed clients are youth or kids, but I've got this program for adults. Like how did you make that transition yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in the Park War Gym we, it , it kind of made the transition organically. You know, we'd get 50, then a hundred, then 150 different families coming , uh, with their kids. And that was, it just was growing. So it was out of necessity that we add more teens classes here, more kids classes here, you know, more like pre-K classes here. Um, eventually some of those kids started getting incredibly talented. We've been open for a decade now, so now a lot of those kids are absolutely insane if you watch them , it's really, really cool. So then we started adding competition teams and you know, if you're just responsive and, and you pay attention, it, it becomes, and it blossoms into the thing that it needs to be. And so then with the adult classes, kind of the same thing. You know, the ones that stuck around, we, we kept a couple adult classes on the schedule. Um, it's important to us at Freedom of Motion to always have an open gym or two on the schedule a week 14 and adults, because me personally as the athlete, that's how I got started was I trained outside for, geez , five plus years until we discovered that there was a local gym in town that had an open gym. And that was really awesome. It was like a weekly meeting spot for me and my friends at that time. So, you know, keeping that on the schedule and keeping a couple of adult classes. And I know that at one of our locations, one of our female athletes , uh, has actually kind of wrangled in a lot of the different parents, a lot of the moms specifically. And now there's like a , like a adult women's class , uh, that's just on the schedule now because those people showed up and there was interest. So, you know, that side happens organically too. It , it just, it just unfolds that way.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, I don't think you're taking enough credit there because when most people say I'm responsive, what they actually mean is they acknowledge like what their market is telling them. They don't actually pivot their product to get good product market fit. 'cause that's hard. You actually did that though. You looked at like, here's what the market wants. They want more afternoon classes. Okay, well I'm gonna have to cancel an adult class. I think a lot of us resist that. Um, so good on you Jimmy. What I'd like to talk about now is like, what are the biggest problems that parkour gyms have? And I think a lot of listeners to this show will say, oh, well, even though I don't have a parkour gym, I have a Crossman gym, or I have a strength and conditioning gym or whatever, they're gonna recognize that they have the same problems. And Jimmy is an amazing mentor. He is great at fixing these problems, and so hearing it from him might make a big difference to you. So Jimmy, let's start with like, what are the biggest problems that parkour gyms face?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at this point, through Motion Mentors, which is our mentor practice specifically for board businesses, we've, we've worked with maybe like 10 plus gyms so far. We just got started. And every single time, the first issue has been pricing and the actual offer itself. So on pricing, every single time, every single person we've worked with, you know, they do the whole classic look around the city. They're charging 80 bucks, they're charging 80 bucks, okay, we'll charge 75 bucks. You know, and while that seems logical, it's, it's only based on this arbitrary assumption that their pricing model works. Even though that other gym probably also just looked around the room and said, everyone else is charging, you know, 85 bucks, we'll charge 80 bucks. But if you, if you start with an underpriced product, you really signal two things , uh, one to the audience , to the audience, the parents coming in that this is a budget class, you know, I'm, this is a commodity. We're comparing this to soccer, we're comparing this to baseball. And the only thing that stands out here is that parkour is kind of cool. But if you can bring that up to be, actually no, we're not just like a , a commodity, you know, park your kids here for an hour or so. We are a community of coaches who are deeply passionate about parkour . Yes. But also the results that we're getting with our client. We're trying to teach people that they are people who can do hard things that even though they walk in with this, you know, preconceived notion of like, oh, this is too difficult, or I'm a klutz, or, you know, I'm not as good as that guy over there or that girl over there, that we will bring you through lessons and through training to your highest level of , of athleticism and show you your potential. And if you can get a parent to realize that that is actually the product that we, the coaches are being mentors for your kids, and that through learning these life skills, they'll be sick at parkour , but they'll also do a lot better in school that'll follow them through life with the increased confidence. And if you can really tell that to a parent through your marketing, through just what you convey and through your actions and your words, you can charge way more for that. So if you compare the price model to like a occupational therapy clinic, you know, they're charging like 400 bucks an hour. And so if Parco is essentially doing that same thing physiologically and mentally, you know, like why are we charging 80 bucks? When you fix that, you, you signal at way higher value, you get better clients, you get parents who are more dedicated and more motivated and they'll help their kids stick with it, which is vital. Yeah. And then on the other side of that, you as the business owner, like you finally actually have money to pay your coaches so that you can keep the best people around. You can actually grow your business. And you know, if you don't have a drinking fountain, finally install one. Or if you hadn't bothered to build a front desk because this whole thing is bootstrapped, like you can finally build a desk that looks good and makes a proper first impression, which then just increases your sales. You know, so this flywheel just comes outta nowhere once you just fix those fundamental pricing and offering issues.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah, I think that's, that's brilliant. And we see this in CrossFit strength and conditioning and fitness gyms all the time too. Their , their pricing is so low that they hamstring themselves and they can't even deliver a good product because they can't afford to. So that's problem number one. Jimmy. And how do you usually address that with a gym? A gym comes in your program, their prices are half what they should be. How do you change that ? Yeah,
Speaker 2:So kind of depends on where they are at. A lot of times I , I'm actually taking this $80 number out of reality that that seems where to be, where a lot of our core gyms are kind of anywhere from, we charge 80 to a hundred bucks a month . My gyms are a lot more than that and a couple other gyms that are successful and actually get incredible results with kids and families are a lot more than that, rightfully so. So if we take those prices that we've have seen work, you know, maybe compare them to like the city's median average family income. So that's one thing we can compare it to. Compare it to how much is your rent? 'cause you know, if you look at your profit and loss statement, you want to try to see like, according to my revenue rent is maybe 15% of that or less. And if your rent is more than that, you're probably not charging enough. So like there's like a fixed line item that you can actually compare it to. That way it's a , a little bit more logical and a little less guessing. And there's a few other strategies that, that we'll look at. But from where they're at, we'll set out a game plan to, okay, let's get you from, you know, here to, geez , if you're at 80, let's get you to 120. Even though that's more than the 15%, like that you would typically advise someone to, to increase your prices by when you're that low, you're only in the eighties, you like, you have to do something. Now if you do 15% every year, you're, you're not even gonna catch up until year six, you know? And so from there we have seen something really incredible happen, happened . We'll work with our parkour gym owners to craft this, you know, heartfelt, empathetic letter that goes out to the members that lays out, here's what's going on, we're increasing prices, but here are all the additional benefits that you're gonna get and receive and immediately notice in the gym, you know, like that drinking found that they were missing, lay all that out. And then parkour business owners, you kinda reminds me of like, yoga people always have that, that that really admirable soft spot of, okay, but half of my families I don't think can afford this. But a lot of times, you know this Chris, they're self projecting. It's, it's 'cause you can't because you're, you're coming from a place of being broke, you know, <laugh>. And so what we do is we have people offer that, hey, client, if this is a financial impact for you, if you, if you cannot do this, we wanna make sure that our program is accessible to you, the family and the community. So we are raising prices, however, if you need to, we're gonna let you lock in your rate. If you prepay up to six months or up to a year and then after that, then you jump up to the normal rate. And so that gives families time to stay at the normal rate provided they prepay, but then they, they feel that change in increased value over the year and then by the end of that year they, they're there with you anyway. And so we just had a parkour gym do this. They only had like a small handful of people less than my fingers cancel . And a ton of other people opted into that six month , one year prepay and they made 15 k turning around, you know, it was like four months of revenue for them and they left all their clients stoked about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And those clients are there for six months, et cetera , et cetera. Like it sounds like a great plan. So Good man. Okay, so problem number one, pricing. You've explained, here's how we fix it in parkour gyms. What's the second biggest problem that you see in parkour gyms? Yeah,
Speaker 2:So I mentioned the offer, I'll touch on that briefly 'cause it's a little bit connected to the pricing structure, but there is definitely something after this. So on the offer, a lot of times park or gym owners sometimes will just try to do way too many a la carte options. Like, oh, you wanna come once a week, twice a week, three times a week, three and a half times a week, unlimited. You know, they'll have all of those plus some weird complicating open gym, yes or no factor <laugh> ,
Speaker 1:Hang , hang on, what's three and a half times. Like you can park your car in the lot but don't come inside
Speaker 2:<laugh>. So I mean, that's half joking, but this is a little bit making fun of myself. I, I did have a, back when I first first started my cheapest option was like a, you can come twice but if you don't want to come, you know, both of those just let us know and we'll remove it from. So it was just like kind of , we, we were just really trying to get members so we were just being as flexible as possible to our own detriment.
Speaker 1:Okay. Sorry to interrupt you. Keep going man.
Speaker 2:Sure. So we try to get parkour gym owners to, to do one few things, but at least do these two things. One is remove the unlimited option because if you have people just, especially 'cause we work with kids, right? So if it's unlimited, you are now the daycare and you have those families that just drop off their kid from when you open to when you end seven, six days a week. Uh, and if you look at the price per class that they attend, now that family is actually paying you like four bucks a class and then that child just feels like they live there and the level of respect becomes a little bit hard to manage. Yeah, it's a slippery slope. So I don't advise unlimited classes. And then the next one is just boil it down to three membership options. Uh, we like to do a once a week, a twice a week, and then a three or four times a week , uh, you know, your choice. And then there could be like a competition, team membership after that, but that's not what you offer on day one. You know, and then like specifically how you price those, especially the middle tier option, if you price the middle tier option a little bit closer to the highest tier option, kinda like when you go to the movies and you order a popcorn and they're like, oh, Mr. Cooper, it's only 50 cents. If you wanna upgrade to the large and you're like, oh , okay, it's only 50 cents, let's upgrade to the large, you know, if you, if you nail your pricing down, you can kind of have those same conditions to bump people up to the, you know, coming more frequently times a week. So yeah, just those little strategic things we can help Mark or gym owners work their way through.
Speaker 1:That's cool man. Do you wanna give us one more example of like challenges that parkour gym faces? Because listening to these, I'm thinking this is verbatim what a fitness gym would face too.
Speaker 2:<laugh>. Yeah, it's, it is super similar. Okay, so if we look at there , there's obviously, you know, dealing with parkour curriculum that would be extremely specific to a parkour gym. Uh, and , and something that might be there would be, if you look at your leveling system , so in martial arts it's like white belt, yellow belt, you know, it ends at black belt in parkour, we're not wearing belts 'cause you're gonna get cotton <laugh> , you know , it's gonna be a bad time. So oftentimes we'll just say like level one, level two, you know, and you'll get a wristband or something, but you want the kids to experience progression and you want the kids to experience that they are like claiming ownership of the sport and the sport is becoming theirs so that then they stick with it. And so we've seen a few parkour gyms make level one just wicked hard for, for beginner students. You know, you get a little 10-year-old in here who's like maybe a little overweight, maybe parkour is first real sport and some gyms are wanting him to, or wanting her to, you know, climb all the way up on top of a wall from hanging, which is pretty brutal even for adults. Wow. Yeah. Or like do, do a move called a Kong vault , which like, you know, is, is a fundamental move, but for a beginner it's really complicated. So removing those gatekeeping moves from your curriculum specifically so that your client journey just feels better so that kids can rank up sooner so that kids get that sense of ownership sooner. And it hugely increases your length of engagement. Just when you think about the psychology that's happening for these kids and for the parents who are watching their kids progress. And you can really affect that by removing those gatekeeping moves is what we call 'em , and just placing them at more appropriate intervals on the client journey.
Speaker 1:Well if you think about how even video games work with kids, I mean the first few levels are so quick that they're winning right off the bat. It , it makes a ton of sense that you want these kids to, to leave as quickly as possible with some kind of win.
Speaker 2:Yeah . Yep . They need to win, they need to feel good and then parkour becomes theirs and then, and then it's their journey and you no longer have to hold their hand. They show up motivated and, and they tell you what they ate , what their goal is for the month. And as a coach, that's wicked awesome, but as a parent, Chris, that is, that's the juice. If you signed your kid up for something and then they show up with their own goals, they got out of bed and got their socks on that morning and they showed up with their full personality as a parent, that's the juice. That's what you're paying for.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah . That's one reason I used to like coaching kids was most of the positive feedback came from the parents. They would say things like, I tell my kid this same thing, but they'll do it if it comes from Chris Cooper, you know, or one parent even told me like, you should charge more for the classes that you run in the evening because it gets my kid to bed on time. You know, it's just, there's a , I'm not a good kid's coach, but it is fun to do it once in a while . So Jimmy, tell us about motion mentors. Like why, what's the need that Motion mentors is serving? What's its place in the market? You know, why are you doing it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Motion Mentors is our mentoring practice for parkour business owners. So not just parkour gyms, it could be outdoor coaching services, it could be someone with a podcast and they want to grow an audience and they want to, you know, get sponsors. We, one of the gym , one of the parkour business owners in our network is business to government, which is really cool trying to get parkour into schools and that , and they're seeing some great success with that. Uh, that's, that's American parkour. Give them a shout out . So that's super cool . And so Motion mentors is trying to connect with those parkour business owners, those Park war entrepreneurs, and through them achieve our goal of having 1 million people learn parkour but not just learn, you know, how to vault and climb. Like actually get that what I just called a second ago. That you , you know, that personal passion and that transformative life experience of learning parkour and what that can now unlock for yourself mentally and physically. We're trying to give that to a million people. And from my, my park or gym's freedom of motion , like we, we can do that, but we have to have like 10,000 gyms to actually give that to a million people. Uh , and I'm gonna try my best Chris <laugh> . But in addition to that, in addition to that, if we can empower other park or businesses to run a profitable model that they feel good about, that actually has an impact on society and the clients that they're serving, that is a much faster and more inclusive path to growing the parkour industry and creating something here that is worth building a career out of.
Speaker 1:What's really interesting, I think, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but if you can give a kid a sport like parkour, not only will they be better at every other sport for the rest of their lives, but now they've got something that they're passionate about that they could really do forever, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Parkour is, I, I struggle to think of a , any other sport that is more of a athletic intelligence building sport that can be easily transferred to any other sport. You know, your proprioception, your ability to sense where you are in the , in space , uh, is vital and is constantly being challenged in parkour. You know, if you fall a whole segment of parkour called chemi , the art of falling, if you fall, like parkour, athletes just instantly know how to maneuver into a safe spot. Land, however, is, you know , most optimal for where they are. Roll if you can and immediately get back up and continue down your obstacle course. And then that's sold with climbing, jumping, swinging, precision landings, you know, like, so it's really transferrable to anything else . So great off season sport. And yeah, as you said, it, it's an individual sport. So when a kid shows up and they have their fears and they have their apprehensions and after a couple of sessions with a coach, they become the kid who is doing those really cool jumps, flowing it right into some other vaults, flowing into some flip that they eventually learned . And they, they have that, they are an incredible athlete, the kid does that lives in their soul Now that just, that sticks with you forever, you know, and that confidence and that that self-esteem, you show up to a job interview 20 years later and you still have that, you are a capable, creative and, and just cool person, you know, and you bring that into your relationships throughout the rest of your life. And so both of those things, athletic intelligence and those, those skills that you just gain from, from the juice <laugh> of parkour , you know, it's, it's , it's really something And that's, that's why I'm so motivated to giving this to a million people because that's what I got when I was 14 and , and that's why I'm on the call with you right now.
Speaker 1:Ah , so amazing. So Jimmy and his partner Christopher, are great mentors. If you have a parkour business at all, just go to motion mentors.com and uh , he'll be happy to help you out. Jimmy, thanks so much for coming on, man. I think gym owners of any type of gym can learn a lot from the lessons that you've just shared here.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. I'm , uh, super stoked to talk with any parkour business owners or anyone who really, if you deal with kids, I can help. If you're listening to this when you're on Facebook, we have a , a group four parkour business owners, it's called Parkour Business Owners. So look that up, you know, we're on, we're on Instagram too. Motion mentors and , uh, happy to help shoot me any free questions. I'll , I'll jump in there with you.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Jimmy. This is Run a Profitable gym and no matter what kind of gym you have, if two Brain can't help you, we can definitely refer you to a brilliant metro like Jimmy who has, you know , niche specific expertise and can help you grow really fast. Thanks, Jimmy. Thanks
Speaker 2:Chris .
