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
CrossFit Games: Moving Beyond the Fittest on Earth
Some CrossFit affiliate owners believe the CrossFit Games are a powerful marketing tool for their gyms.
But is that really true?
In this special episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper challenges the idea that the Games help affiliates and explores what must change to make them a win for more than just elite athletes.
Coop explains why Games exposure doesn’t translate to measurable benefits for affiliates and encourages CrossFit to look to other fitness competitions that are thriving.
He highlights what Hyrox, Spartan Races, the Rogue Invitational and fitness festivals such as the Arnold are doing well, and he explains how CrossFit can learn from them.
It’s time to rethink who the Games are really for. Tune in to hear Chris’ take.
If you missed any of the other episodes in this special series, check them out via the links below.
Links
How to Save CrossFit
Q&A With Coop
Save the Affiliate Movement
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
00:47 - The purpose of the Games
3:15 - Should HQ scrap the Games?
4:22 - Hyrox and Spartan
6:20 - The Rogue Invitational
7:43 - Fitness festivals
How to save the CrossFit Games. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and I am not a CrossFit games athlete. In fact, I'm not even sure that I'm a CrossFitter. I'm a cyclist who does high intensity interval training workouts about twice a week, and I quite often cherry pick my old favorite named CrossFit Watts. But here's what I am. I'm an affiliate owner who was 14 years as an affiliate. I worked for CrossFit HQ for six years, and I now mentor more CrossFit affiliate owners than anyone else in the world through two Brain business. Our mentorship program. I've written books about CrossFit in business. We have the largest data set for gyms in the world. And for the past 10 years, I've tried to do for CrossFit affiliates what CrossFit HQ should have been doing all along. Now, back before the Reebok era, the games served a different purpose than it does now. While it was a competition to find the fittest on earth, there were a lot of regional events, and your gym had a fairly decent shot of putting a few people into a sectional or probably may , maybe even a regional, right? Mine did that a few times. But when Reebok and ES PN two arrived, we started to get really excited about the marketing potential that the big brands would give us. We confused exposure with marketing. We thought that if more people just heard about CrossFit, they would show up at our boxes. Similarly, I can remember when the first nanos came out and one of the shoe stores in our town carried them. And so my wife and I went down to the mall. She had our camera, and there was these big posters of the , the CrossFit, Reebok, Delta, and the nano shoes. And she took my picture in front of 'em and I called a meeting of all of my coaches back at my gym. Guys, this is so huge. Can all of you work some extra hours? We're gonna have to do all these on ramps. Maybe we should go back to a group on ramp . No, that didn't work. Can we, can we, how many more clients can we take? What's our capacity? We thought that a shoe store selling CrossFit shoes was gonna pump so many people to our gym, along with the CrossFit games being on ES , espn two , that we wouldn't be able to handle the inflow. Now, of course, that was wrong, right? And some of you're probably laughing, that's good, but that's because we assumed that exposure was the same as marketing. Now, because of that, over the years, we started to believe the story that the games were the marketing for CrossFit. But let's stop and ask ourselves, who is the games marketing actually helping? Does it help the two people who become the fittest on Earth? Yeah, they make a few bucks and they get some sponsors. They deserve it. Good for them. Does it help the runners up the second, third, fifth place? Well, not much, but a few people can actually make a career at this. Now, does it help the sponsors? Possibly, I'm, I'm not sure. You'd have to ask them. Does it help the affiliates? Not anymore. Unless you're in Eastern Europe, you probably don't have people coming in and saying, I watched the games. I wanna sign up for CrossFit anymore. The games provides affiliates with exposure, but it doesn't increase their lead generation or the value of their service or their retention or anything else that's measurable. And honestly, last year the attention wasn't even all that positive. So if the games is really only a win for the people who win the games, the fittest on Earth, should HQ scrap it? Or can we look at what others are doing well and use the opportunity to pivot? The cool thing about Tube Brain and the way that we've built it is that I don't have to have every idea myself. I can look out and say, what's that person doing? How is that person improving their retention metrics? Let's find out. Let's get them on the podcast. Let's look at their metrics. And if it's teachable, we'll teach it to everybody else, just like Greg did with Deadlift. How is that person deadlifting over a thousand pounds? Let's talk to them. Let's get their numbers and maybe they can help us do better too. And so with that in mind, I think that we can look at other people and what they're doing in the fitness space, take some of their ideas and potentially incorporate it into the Games 2.0, the next evolution of the CrossFit Games. I'm a firm believer that success leaves clues. And after talking with some very smart people in the industry, not the games athletes, but the people who are out there running events, helping affiliates, I got a few suggestions to consider. Number one, look at High Rocks. Spartan has a similar program to High Rocks called , um, Spartan Deca , but it's fitness racing. It's really simple. They could put hundreds of people through a course in a day. The course doesn't change. It's not a surprise. You don't learn about it five minutes before you do it. Can somebody actually win with hundreds of people going through this course in a day? Probably there probably is a winner at the end of the day, but nobody really cares. They're really just excited about doing the challenge. Before , um, high Rocks , the best example of this was probably Spartan Race. Nobody was trying to really be the Spartan World champion except for that guy named Hunter Hunter Thornton. But thousands and thousands, millions of people did Spartan races because they wanted to test their fitness. They wanted to feel like, this is the healthiest I've ever been. This is the fittest day of my life. And that's what we need to think more about because that will actually benefit affiliates. If you wanna look at some metrics this year, the CrossFit open enrollment dropped by over 30%. That's massive. Meanwhile, in the last year, high Rocks has grown six x 600%. CrossFit doesn't have to copy High Rocks to learn from them. Simpler is better. This is a good lesson to learn. Keep it simple. Participation is the king, not crowning the fittest on earth. And the ultimate winner ultimately really doesn't matter, right? You wanna give people this amazing experience that they can talk about. You wanna give 'em a story that they're gonna share and snap their own pictures at and , and be proud of, and then go to a concert maybe that night and get a t-shirt and like, that's it. People will pay big money to do this stuff. Just like at Spartan Race, instead of the games being a money losing venture for HQ that doesn't benefit the affiliates, why not just flip it on its head? Start over. Build a fitness festival that you run in five or six places around the country to start with and let people build their own story. You know, find their fittest day, win their own personal journey, get a T-shirt, listen to a rock concert, and go home. The second place that I would look is the Rogue Invitational. In fact, just asking Rogue to run the events for CrossFit would probably save the games. I don't know if you've been to one of these events. My , the last one I went to was down in Austin last year. And the community, the feeling, the vibe, it just feels like CrossFit circa 2017. Like, these people are amazing, but they're not outta reach. And if I train really, really, really hard, I might not win, but I could get to the competition floor. You really don't feel that with the games anymore. And it's, you know, things get juggled every year and whatnot. But if you set things up and if you , you partner with Rogue, you're gonna have an amazing event that you're proud to take your members to , you're gonna have this amazing feeling of pride just being in the crowd. Boy, when the two Brain Business banner came up all over that Rogue Invitational in Austin, I was so proud that I almost cried. But showing up with 10 people from your gym, 20 people, 30 people, and you're all gonna run through the challenge, one after the other, maybe together, maybe cross the finish line, arm and arm. And it's gonna be amazing because Rogue built it and it's gonna be one of the five peak moments that they remember on their deathbed, and they're gonna tell their friends about it forever, man. Like that is irreplaceable value to the affiliates where crowning the top king and queen of fitness on earth. I don't think that does have value. Another good example is like the Arnold. Now this is for bodybuilding, meatheads , but it attracts thousands and thousands of people who are not bodybuilders because they wanna see the show and they wanna see the other people. But a Fe Festival atmosphere is great, and if you incorporate something like a a fitness challenge or a race, you , you've just got a win-win for everybody, right? So just give people a chance to show up, do a workout with their friends, and stay for the party. Look, there are other examples out there to draw from. Even online cycling. I'm a cyclist, but the Tour de WT had half a million participants this year, and it's online cycling with a smart trainer. You don't really know anybody else, but you're making friends. You're competing for about six weeks, you're doing eight different races. You're tracking your progress against previous years. It keeps you training through the dark months when you can't be outside on the road, et cetera. I'm not saying that CrossFit's competition should be online. What I'm saying is there's probably something to learn from these events that are growing while CrossFit is shrinking and there's no better time to rethink it. This is gonna be a controversial take. The other games alternatives that you see out there, like different leagues and organizations of athletes and unions and all this stuff, these are just small variations on the original concept of the games. What I'm saying is it's time to revisit the original concept and ask who are the games for? And if they are truly to benefit affiliates, then let's run them in a way that helps my clients love CrossFit, love my gym, love their fitness, love themselves, love their friends even more. And I think the way to do that is to make it more of a festival. I'm Chris Cooper. This has Run a Profitable Gym. I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you've got a better plan, let's hear it.
