Saving CrossFit: Coop Answers Your Questions

Last week, Chris Cooper published a blog titled “How to Save CrossFit,” and the response was massive—affiliate owners, coaches and industry leaders reached out with questions and concerns.

Today, in this special episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris answers their questions.

Coop addresses why he deaffiliated from CrossFit and why the method must evolve, then he digs into a question many have asked him: Would he ever buy CrossFit LLC?

Chris also defines what real change would look like in a complete overhaul, including how to rebuild CrossFit Media, redefine the purpose of the Games, and offer affiliates real education and mentorship to help them succeed.

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes in this series: Chris will explain how affiliates can be saved and lay out a plan for the evolution of the CrossFit Games.

And if you missed the first part of this special series, it's linked below.

Links

How to Save CrossFit

Gym Owners United

Book a Call  

5:33 - First 90 days of complete change

10:21 - What about Europe?

14:42 - Is CrossFit in danger?

17:34 - Affiliates’ concerns

20:35 - Could Coop buy CrossFit?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey, I am Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym . I'm the founder of Reign Business and last week I published a blog post called How to Save CrossFit. It was prompted by CrossFit Inc's announcement that they were looking for a buyer the way they did. It felt kind of like your way at summer camp and your mom and dad put a for sale sign in front of your house. But that's beside the point. I wanted to publish something to start a conversation on what it would take to change. I wanted to give a plan knowing that no plan is ever perfect at inception, but a plan is always required to start. Immediately after I published the Post, I got a lot of texts from people that I really admire in the industry, people around the perimeter of CrossFit who are very invested like me in the health and wellbeing of affiliates. Most of the texts that I got said something like, I really liked your first five points, but I didn't really agree with point number six. And that's okay. No plan is ever perfect on first draft, but you have to start with a plan and adjust or you'll never get anywhere. It's very, very easy to complain or to knock holes in somebody else's plan or say That guy's dumb. That won't work. But it's also really, really easy to spend a year apologizing for your mistakes without fixing anything. You know, trust me, I'm a Canadian. It's super easy to take surveys and tell people we're listening, we hear you, but not actually make any change. And these are all just ways of kicking the can of responsibility down the road, like the next owner will fix it. What's really hard is saying, here's the plan, because you're gonna open yourself up to all that other stuff from people who don't want to face potential criticism, right? The people who want to condemn and complain and shoot fiery arrows and raise the pitchforks, but don't wanna share a plan themselves. This is the kind of stuff that you see in big bureaucratic companies, but it's also the kind of stuff that you see online. After I posted the blog post though, well I did get some of that. I got some really great questions from people, very smart people in our free group, gym owners united.com, and of course from the smartest people in the Two Brain Business Mentorship program. And I'm gonna go through them here because I think they really add a lot of value to the conversation and probably evolve the plan to make an even better one. So the first question that I got wasn't really a criticism, but somebody said like, why are you talking about this when you're not even an affiliate? And the truth is that I , I affiliated a couple of years ago. I first affiliated , uh, when Greg sold the company de affiliated . When Greg sold the company, Dave Castro called me and said, just give us a year. We're gonna fix it. After another year and a half, I de affiliated again when the L two requirement came in. I'm not in my gym every day. I'm not gonna go get an L two to keep my affiliate, but there's two ways to look at the affiliation. The first is to say, coop , you're abandoning a sinking ship. And that's what I told myself for many years that I could help more from the inside. I've spent over a decade giving, helping first trying to get CrossFit HQ to help affiliates more. Sometimes it worked, it got through. I'm still published in the CrossFit Journal sometimes. Most of the time it , it just didn't work out. The other way to look at de affiliation is to say, I'm no longer willing to prop up the regime that's giving affiliates bad advice. Now it's a personal choice, right? I don't think anybody else has had the same experience that I have trying to work this out with hq. And that's why I don't tell people through Tube Brain to affiliate or de affiliate or re affiliate. I'm not an affiliate right now , but I might be against someday . Now, when Berkshire Partners bought CrossFit, I had a couple of conversations with Eric Rosa . Within 48 hours of him taking over things just didn't feel right. And so that's when I put in my first de affiliation request. Dave Castro called and said, give it a year, but things actually got worse in that year. That said, there are over 20 mentors at Two Brain who are still affiliated. And I'm optimistic that someday I will re affiliate. I love CrossFit, but I just couldn't support the current ownership anymore after trying to deal with them. Eventually you learn to walk around the table instead of stubbing your toe on it all the time. But again, personal choice, probably a unique situation. On the other end of the spectrum, I got 10 times as many messages saying you should buy CrossFit and thank you for that. It's very flattering that people think that I should, but I'm actually better on the outside. If I worked for HQ or any company that bought CrossFit, I would be beholden to them. And this would be true even if somebody loaned me the money to buy it myself From Berkshire Partners right now, one of the things that people at HQ have working against them is that they have to show a profit right now, and that means they can't make some of the hard moves that are necessary for the long term . And many of the longtime staff at HQ really depend on their jobs, so they can't afford to rock the boat. One of the higher level execs told me last month, we know that we're probably not giving the advice that we should, but affiliate owners don't want to hear it. So we tell 'em to just keep getting more coaching credentials. Now that's paraphrasing, that's not a verbatim quote, but just the whole principle there had me going. It's our duty to tell people what they need to hear and then let them come to terms with it instead of just, you know, saying what they think they want to hear. And as an outsider, I can do that. I can say, Hey, the emperor's not wearing any clothes without getting fired or carrying about making Berkshire Partners a dividend this quarter. One of the best questions I got was from Josh who said, what would the first 90 days of a complete change look like? Well, the first step is always clarifying the mission. Are we still selling constantly varied functional movement at high intensity or is that a tool to deliver the real mission, which is to improve fitness in our communities across broad time and modal domains? Now, if that's the mission to improve fitness in our communities, then the definition of fitness should be evolving over time, and that will evolve the methodology too. It's just a matter of course. So obviously we need somebody with a scientific approach to weigh the benefits of the new science, like tracking biomarkers, you know, CrossFit promoted us all buying a whoop, but what do we do with that? Well, I guess nothing. Uh , what about zone two? We should be talking about that. Which of these things have merit and should be incorporated into the methodology to make it stronger and which of them are just fads? Now this can't be done by committee. I watched.com programming get done by committee once while I was working at hq, and I think you can guess how that went. Everybody got their own little spicy workout, right? And we lost the , the principle we lost. Why are we doing this? The next most important thing, and this is critical, it's urgent, is CrossFit Media has to be rebuilt. Most of the value of affiliation was the media produced by hq. Storytelling is more important than anything else as we need to give clients hope, we need to give affiliates hope, and that's by telling a better story, a story of success, a story of evolution, a story of change, a story of improvement. And then if the mission is really to increase fitness in our communities, the games has to change. It has to be a representation or the of the pinnacle of that story. It's too late to change it for 2025, but in 2026, I would look more toward a festival repeated in five to six places in the US instead of finding the one or two fittest on earth. So you have a full day with multiple events to test fitness. You make it possible to run thousands of people through like Spartan Race or High Rocks. I'd probably just leave the operations to Rogue because they do it right. If you've ever been to the Rogue Invitational, you know what I mean? The goal should be to put thousands of people through not to crown the single fittest on earth. The finding the fittest on Earth doesn't help hq, it doesn't help affiliates, it only helps the person who wins. And then you have a concert to end the day, make everybody feel like they've just accomplished the fittest day of their lives. Give them a T-shirt and that's a win for thousands of people instead of two. Now, I said earlier that HQ has three products. So the first is the methodology, the second is certification. I probably wouldn't mess with certification, but I'd shorten the bench to the best and the brightest. Greg had a habit of hiring people just 'cause he liked them and he wanted to give them a job. That's how I got my job at media. I didn't, I wasn't qualified for that job, but Greg liked me for a while and at least, and that's how I got the job. But with fewer certification, weekends requiring fewer people, many instructors are now getting called out once every four to six weeks, make the best full-time, send them out every weekend and maximize the value at seminars. Now the third product is affiliation. In truth, I would do what Two Brain is already doing. Start collecting data from partners like Waify , push Press and Kilo. Publish that every year to every affiliate. We do this because HQ said that they wouldn't then begin a real educational series for affiliates. Start by teaching them how to read a profit and loss statement, then teach them how to build an on-ramp, how to sell an on-ramp, how to build a great income with 150 members. You don't have to force a particular model on anyone, but you do have to teach everyone how to choose a model based on math and financial metrics. You have to make business owners financially literate. And again, two , brainin does exactly this because it's what I think HQ should be doing. Then you teach how to build and run for marketing funnels, how to retain clients better, how to pay yourself and your staff, and you teach this to all new affiliates. You provide a mentorship option for all new and existing affiliates because coaches should have coaches provide the course as part of affiliation and make the mentorship optional for a fee. It's probably worth mentioning that two Brainin does a lot of this for free already. So it's not hard to find speakers or tools or resources to share with affiliates every month instead of putting on meaningless round tables or putting people on stage who can't prove that their idea works. In short, I try to provide all the stuff that HQ should be making available. The tools and knowledge are free through gym owners united.com. The step-by-step courses are available through our mentorship program, and of course we sell mentorship with a real investment so that people will do the work. Just like coaching at your gym, it's no coincidence that like CrossFit, the knowledge is free and the coaching is magical. The next great question that I got, thanks Josh for that again, was what about Europe? The gyms there seem to be thriving, or what about Europe? I just opened in Spain. I've got 300 members in a year. Well, the affiliates in France and you know Denmark, Germany, they're now facing what happened in the Nordic countries, Finland, Sweden, Norway a couple years ago, and also UK and Ireland fall in that bucket. The early adopters joined when the gyms open and now they're gone. The days of easy leads are over That myth that if you build a day will come. That's a thing of the past. This happened in Eastern North America in Australia about five years ago, Western North America , uh, about seven years ago, and it continues to just follow the growth of CrossFit around the globe from west to east. Right now, owning a CrossFit gym in Spain is pretty easy, just as it was pretty easy in France in 2021. Pretty easy in Sweden in 2019. Pretty easy in Boston in 2017 and pretty easy in LA in 2014. But that will change. The affiliates running a tight ship with defined systems and solid marketing funnels will survive. The affiliates who have committed to a huge space and 12 coaches for clients who aren't there are gonna fall to the competition. The next question was, are the non-serious gym owners, the hobbyists ruining it for the affiliates who depend on on their gyms to make a living? Now we're not sure because we can't identify these in our data dataset. We do have a qualitative survey that about 500 gyms fill in every year, but we have quantitative data from thousands more. But I will say that over 70% of the affiliates who join two brainin have an income goal of a hundred thousand dollars a year. So either they're relying on their gym as their sole source of income or they wanna leave their other job within the next two years. So empirically speaking, most of the hobbyists seem to be gone now there's this separation in the market because between those people who are getting better and those who are getting worse, and the people who were in the middle who could just tread water can't do it anymore because of rising rents and affiliate fees and insurance, et cetera . Now the libertarians out there would say that this is what's supposed to happen. And over decades, maybe that's true, but to me, every single affiliate owner is a human being who's taken a life-changing risk for a cause they believe in to help other people live healthier, happier lives. They are in the arena, they're some of the scrappiest entrepreneurs in the world, and as somebody said in the gym owners united.com group earlier, HQ needs its affiliates more than they need hq. They're the ones who can save the movement. Another great question was, what about the lease rents model that Greg Glassman promoted? Well, the lease rents model doesn't mean that HQ doesn't offer more services. It means they don't make more services mandatory to roll it into the price and build the price up. The RRG is a good example. It was an unnecessary addition to the ecosystem to generate cash flow , though there was really good storytelling around it, right? Affiliates were already well represented in the insurance space by good insurance companies with a good track record of fighting these battles, but it was still not forced on anybody. No affiliate had to buy it. Many of them did because of the good storytelling. They said stuff like, only we can protect CrossFit, right? Unfortunately, private equities MO is just plain generate revenue and they can do that through adding more affiliates, selling more courses and selling more sponsorship. But if they can't do those things or if doing those things is really hard, then they have to make more money on the affiliates and the courses and the sponsorships that they already have. And that means increasing the affiliate rate, requiring an L two to own an affiliate shortening the recertification cycle from five years to three selling sponsorships that don't really fit the mission and taking a revenue cut from the partners that they recommend in the A PN. Now that these have all been done, the next owner will have to do more of the same. And so that will likely mean increasing affiliate rates. Again, bringing in more services inside hq, like offering uh , free booking and billing software. For example, getting control of your payment cash flow and then increasing the price of affiliation. That's the more rents model. However, the more these services become baked in, the closer the affiliation gets to a franchise, right? And that's where we start to cross some legal lines. So the next buyer can only do that up to a point, but it's very likely that they will do it. The next question was, is CrossFit actually in danger? It seems profitable, and this was in response to the title of my post, how to Save CrossFit. So let me clarify, the company isn't in danger of bankruptcy. It's in danger of losing affiliates, shrinking its size, reach, and revenue and ability to save lives. The individual affiliates are in danger as they always have been because we all started as first time entrepreneurs and we believe that being good coaches would make us good at business. The methodology itself is also in danger. The trademark is in danger. The certifications are in danger of losing talented staff due to shrinking enrollment. The games are in danger. These not just the corporation make up CrossFit, it's not the company, it's the movement that's at risk. Any method or process or system that does not evolve becomes fragile. People look for alternatives that match their updated reality. As long as CrossFit gyms dogmatically adhere to constantly varied functional movement at high intensity, make every workout hard for the sake of being hard run free trials and big groups as their only option, they'll continue to wonder why they keep running outta clients after two to three years. But private Equity's mission is to buy a working product that hasn't been fully monetized and either sell more of it or make more from its existing audience. They're not in this to evolve the method or debate science that would slow down their return on investment. And so the methodology stays stagnant and becomes more fragile as affiliates adopt wearable tech and program more zone two, and they run High Rocks events and they start to ask themselves, am I really still doing CrossFit? The brand is in danger as they continue to hire media and marketing experts who are more concerned with getting their name mentioned in future business case studies in the Harvard Business Review than with telling stories about CrossFit. These are true conversations that I've had with people at hq. One said, someday CrossFit's gonna be a case study at Harvard. Whether we're successful at turning it around or not, that is not what uh , a live or die CrossFitter is gonna say, right? Affiliates depend on all of these things to work regardless. Who holds the CrossFit Ink baseball card this month? And that's what I care about. The next question was a follow up . What do you mean when you say the method must evolve? Well, it's really why we started strength coach collective.com to have these conversations as with two brand business back in 2016, instead of waiting for CrossFit HQ or the NSCA to do the right thing, I'm just gonna do it now. Strength Coach Collective is where we talk about bridging the , the gap between the researchers, the scientists, and the practice of actually coaching people. It's where we take the ideas from atia and we talk to people who are actually implementing them in your gym. Another question was about affiliate rates. And I had mentioned that rates are very likely to go up if there's a new buyer. And this person said, do you think affiliates would pay more for a affiliation if the rates went up? Again? I think many affiliates would welcome the addition of value if it exceeds the additional price. So if you raise it by a thousand a year, but provide 10,000 more in value, yeah, people will embrace it, right? Tube Brighten is a case in point. CrossFit had the opportunity to launch a mentorship program for business a decade ago. Now, thousands of affiliates are happy to pay our team of mentors because the ROI is many times more than the investment when they do the work. It's too late for CrossFit HQ to try and do that themselves from scratch because they're 10 years behind us with no data. It's just guessing. But there are other ways that they can add value that's disproportionate to the price. I just want to quickly mention something here. The current Facebook marketing strategy is not it. Some affiliates are now saying like, oh, I get two to three leads per year, per month, or whatever from CrossFit, but really this is a Trojan horse. Um, and a lot of affiliates have brought this up, right? It didn't occur to me until somebody pointed to it. What happens is that when somebody in your city sees a Facebook ad from CrossFit, they're directed to the CrossFit site, then they're guided to the cross closest CrossFit affiliates near them. What that means is that the all of the lead traffic is going to CrossFit, and if you de affiliate, you're cut off from that. In fact, you're kind of competing with CrossFit on ad spend . If you're running ads and they're running ads and you're both in New York, they're driving up ad costs for CrossFit for your gym. What this also means is that they can cut off your lead flow. Now, luckily this hasn't been successful enough for anybody to become dependent on it yet, but affiliates should be looking at this stuff with a skeptical eye. The key to having affiliates understanding increased value before increased price is gonna be changing the story, right? Greg Glassman's Lease rents model was a really sticky one that he told to explain their pay to use the name, and that's it. Agreement. In reality, it allowed HQ to license the name without taking responsibility for affiliate success by crossing into that franchise territory and all the laws that go along with it. So a new and better story would be about value, not price, but CrossFit needs a really strong media team to change that story and teach it to the affiliates who also need to change their story about value and price. By the way , um, the next question came from somebody who actually said, I'm glad it's shrinking. There's too many affiliates already in three years, there will be no other affiliates except for me, and I'll have no competition in my city. I think that the affiliates competing against each other is just a product of the environment. It's kind of a scarcity mindset, and we're all first time entrepreneurs and they , we come into this terrified, we have a lot to lose. So we adopt this mindset of scarcity and we think , uh, you know , stealing all my clients. And the only way outta that is to teach financial literacy and marketing and sales to actually train people to be good at business, or they'll always be scared for good reason. The next question was another flattering one, like, couldn't somebody like you just buy it? The problem is that I can't operate under the confines or influence even of a board, right? Movements do not get started by committee. Greg Glassman had a small group of of people he really trusted around him, but he wasn't taking a poll. He wasn't trying to run a democracy at hq. So while affiliates could pool together, they have all the power form some kind of board, and collectively buy CrossFit, they still need to set that up properly. You know, somebody I really admire in this space last night was talking to me about the Hershey Chocolate Company structure. So essentially, Hershey is owned by a trust. Like the affiliates could own a trust. That trust has a board of directors, but there's a CEO who runs the company without interference. Affiliates could form a trust, basically elect a board, and then that board would hire A CEO . That CEO would still be accountable, but they'd have the power to make unilateral decisions because they would just be fired if it didn't turn out. Now, I would be skeptical of forming one huge cooperative of 9,958 affiliate owners, which is the current count I saw on HQ's website this morning, because getting them to agree on anything is impossible. However, the RRG proves that it might work. A really great story creates belief, which buys the CEO time to fix the problems. This would take a very strong decisive CEO because things are gonna have to get worse before they get better. The time for easy change is over. It's four years behind us. Also, I just wanna make it clear like I'm not gunning for a CEO job. I'm pretty much unemployable at this point. I'm better on the outside. I'm just the kid in the crowd that's yelling. The emperor's not wearing any clothes. You know, all growth starts with the affiliates. Now, in the beginning, the formula for growth for CrossFit was somebody found the main site, they fell in love with the method. They got certified, they opened an affiliate. But by 2013, that model had completely flipped. Now it's find an affiliate. Fall in love with the method. Get certified, open your own affiliate. All revenue used to start with the main site. Now it starts with the affiliate. All certifications come from the affiliates. All new affiliates come from existing affiliates. The affiliates have all the power and they're decreasing in number. Hopefully this q and a, which came from amazing questions from the two brand business membership program, and also from our free group. Gym owners united.com will help answer some of the secondary questions that come from introducing a plan, and that's why you introduce a plan so that you have these meaningful discussions instead of just throwing more mud at HQ and blaming them for everything. I hope this helps you. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and no matter what kind of gym you're running, if it's a CrossFit gym or not, we can all learn a ton as we go through this experience and go through it. We're gonna have to, because the only way out is through it .