Want to Earn $100K From Your Gym? Start With This Checklist

Want to earn $100,000 a year from your gym? Passion alone won’t cut it. You need a clear plan.

Today, Chris Cooper introduces a proven, step-by-step guide: “The Gym Owner’s Checklist for Hitting $100K+ Annual Income.”

Based on data from thousands of gyms worldwide, this checklist outlines exactly what you need to do to build a profitable, sustainable business.

It’s broken down into six essential areas:

- Get More Clients
- Average Revenue Per Member (ARM)
- Length of Engagement (LEG)
- Effective Hourly Rate (EHR)
- Staff
- Finance

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the business side of gym ownership, this checklist will give you a clear path forward.

Join Chris for a live walkthrough and Q&A on April 29 at 12 p.m. EDT in Gym Owners United—linked below.

Links

Gym Owners United

Book a Call  

0:01 - Intro

2:29 - Overview of the checklists 

3:48 - Client headcount, value & retention

8:13 - Owner pay, staff & finance

9:50 - Your next step

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey, it's Chris Cooper here and we're taking the mystery out of growing your gym. This is something that I've been working on for the last six months, but really it's been a journey of over a decade to simplify gym ownership into a checklist this simple. And today I'm gonna share with you what exactly you have to do to grow your gym. I'm gonna give you this checklist tool so that you can just check things off, find out where you're doing well already and what you need to build. And then from there, I'm even gonna make an offer to take you through this in a live training on April 29th. Now, business ownership usually seems really, really complicated. I have to do all these things and, and gym owners tend to get overwhelmed by all the things they want to do, and sometimes we get discouraged because it's just not what we signed up for. But breaking things down into a manageable checklist means that we can pick the problem apart, we can make it achievable, and you can walk through this thing. So even though this checklist might seem long, the reality here is I'm giving you the exact steps to grow your business. I'm gonna walk you through it briefly now, but if you wanna do this with me, ask questions, go through a live training. We're gonna do that April 29th at 12 noon eastern time@gymownersunited.com. That's our free public Facebook group for gym owners where we are just there to serve and help you grow for free. So I'm gonna walk you through this checklist right now briefly, but on April 29th at noon eastern, we're gonna go step by step through everything. I'll answer your questions. Coop , what do you mean? Before I get into this, I want you to know exactly where we get these numbers. Every year for the last five years, two brain business has conducted a massive data collection and we work with different partners like software companies to get their data from thousands and thousands of gyms around the world. It's the biggest data set in the world. And from that, we're able to say, how many leads do you need to get? What does the average gym owner make? How much revenue does the average gym owner make? How are these types of gyms doing compared to these types of gyms? You can't find this literally anywhere else in the world. One value of that data set and doing all that work is that it allows us to build a checklist just like this. What do you need to do? And one of the biggest values of a checklist like this is it also tells you what you can stop doing, what you can stop wasting time on. So let's briefly go through it. You can get this checklist, by the way, for me, for free from gym owners united.com , um, starting April 29th. So just log in there. All right , let's see what's in the guide here. Remember that when you open a gym, you are no longer just a coach. Being a coach is an amazing job. But when you open a gym, you become the CEO of that gym and your primary responsibility is to grow that gym. Now, you don't grow that gym by teaching better classes. You don't grow that gym by getting more certifications in CrossFit or Juujitsu or whatever. You grow that gym by becoming a better CEO. And so that's what this checklist is gonna do. This is gonna give you the master checklist of what you've gotta do to grow this gym . We've broken it into six sections, how to get more clients, how to increase the value of each client, a RM, how to keep your clients long enough to change their lives. That's LEG. Um, how to make sure that you're focusing your time on CEO activities instead of, you know, emptying the garbage and washing the dishes. Um, what you should be doing for your staff and what you should be tracking for finance. Because let's face it, a lot of us when we open a gym are first time entrepreneurs and we don't know anything about finance. We don't know what a p and l is. We don't know how to read a balance sheet or an income statement, none of that. And so we just get scared and, and we keep putting it off and we tell ourselves, if I'm just a better coach and I coach better classes, that's gonna save my gym. That's not true. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can actually start growing your gym because nobody else is coming to do it for you. Alright , let's get into this here. So the first checklist I've got here is getting more clients. I wanna make sure that you're doing the things that you need to do to get more clients. And if you answer no to any of these things, well that's what you need to start doing. So for example, I've got the, the evaluate evaluation up here. First, you know, do you measure your set rate? If you don't, you need to learn how to measure your set rate and start doing that. I measure my show rate, okay? And once you can say, yes, I measure those things, then you can look at this chart and say, okay, well my set rate is 62% or better. Now if you're not measuring your set rate, that's where you need to start. Don't get overwhelmed and say, I don't even know what that is. Your first job as CEO and responsibility is to find out what that is. Now of course, we teach this in our mentorship program. We publish free content on this stuff every single day and we have for over a decade. You'll get access to resources like this in gym owners united.com . And you can ask me this question specifically if you want to on April 29th at noon eastern in our free training. The best path, of course, is mentorship to learn this stuff. Think of mentorship as an investment that most people would've made before they open a business. But you and I were just too passionate about fitness and we jumped right in. So here's the checklist to get more clients. Now we're gonna go through this briefly, but we'll go through it more in depth at our free training April 29th. So using a spreadsheet, how many clients do you wanna get? If the answer is just more, then that's never gonna be an achievable target. We will figure out this target by calculating the revenue that you need to pay your expenses and make an income and pay your coaches. And then we set a target for your clients. If you haven't done that yet, that's really the first step. Then you wanna measure how you're doing. So you figure out like, where's my funnel leaking? So you say, I measure how many leads I get, I have a referral funnel, I have a content funnel, et cetera. And you just go through this list, it'll take you probably five minutes. I bet that you can answer these questions just right off the top of your head. No measurement required. And then , um, all the ones that's you say no to are things that you need to build if you wanna have like a really good functioning gym. Now, it might seem like we're making the business of owning a gym complicated, but we're actually making it a lot simpler. You know, people out there will tell you it's not complicated. Just get more clients. The more clients you get in the door, the better the gym you have. But if you've been in business for more than 10 minutes, you know that's a lie and they're trying to sell you an easy answer, right? Just like people are trying to sell our clients an easy answer like Ozempic business coaches and marketing agencies that tell you that growing a business is simple is trying to sell you a magic pill. So here's the checklist again, you know, this is just to give yourself an honest assessment of where you're starting from. Think of it as a functional movement screen for business. And you know, you're just, you wanna see the s's and the no's because then you got rid of all the maybes and you've got clarity. And you know, even if you've got a lot of work to do, you know what that work is and you can just do it. 'cause I know you're a hard worker then. Okay, so here's the get more clients checklist. You go through it. If you've got a green a yes in every category, congratulate yourself. That's a win. If you've got some nos, hey, you know, get to work building those things. And if you want some free resources, gym owners united.com has lots. If you want coaching, well that's what two brain business is really here for. Okay? The next checklist we're gonna walk through is a RM. You know, do you actually track it? And is your a RM red, yellow, or green? Then from there you can say, Hey, I can pay my bills with 50 clients. And we go through this a RM checklist. Okay? Now the get more clients one is the longest one because that's where we get the most questions. But the reality here is that you need to go through each of these checklists. Then we're gonna walk through retention. Retention is important because if you're not keeping people for two years, you're probably not changing their lives. And so we wanna make sure that you're doing that. Most gyms will over-report retention. They say they're doing better than they actually are. So this is your chance to say, how am I actually doing? Okay? Uh , so we're gonna also track lifetime value of a client. Then we're gonna go through a checklist for retention. Retention is one of these fuzzy topics that everybody knows they should care about, but nobody actually breaks down into what works. And they give recommendations about, oh , you need a badging system. You don't, you just need to do these things. And if you can check yes off the , on these, I know you're gonna have amazing retention. That's more than two years. Alright ? By the way, if you think that your retention is already more than two years and you're running a group coaching gym , I really, I'm asking you dive in and check it for sure. This is one that you really can't afford to get wrong. Effective hourly rate. The reason we're tracking this is we wanna see are you doing CO work or are you mostly just being a coach or are you an underpaid coach, or are you being paid as a janitor to do a CEO's job? Okay? We're gonna walk through this checklist too. Staffing , uh, we wanna know, like have you set yourself up with success? Hey, if, if you hire people in , in two years, three years, they're gone, it's because you haven't checked the things off on the staffing checklist. It's not enough to have staff. You have to keep your staff, you have to motivate your staff. You have to get your staff to do things that you want done in the way that you want them done. That's what leadership is . And that's why this checklist is here . We're gonna check these things off . It could be that out of the 12 things on the staff checklist, you can say yes to 11 of them . Wonderful. Your priority is now obvious and you can get to work on improving your business. But one thing sometimes can be enough to kill the whole deal. Finance. Hey, look, this is the scary one for most people, but let's face it, nothing gets fixed by avoiding it. Just like your clients don't lose weight by pushing off their gym membership for two more months. You are not gonna fix your profitability by avoiding looking at your financial statements. So you just wanna know, honestly, do you know what a p and l is? Do you know how to read a p and l? Do you know how to make decisions with it? If you don't, that's your priority. And you can go get coaching or you can ask your bookkeeper, how do I read this? And eventually you'll take control of your business. Okay? There's the finance checklist. Uh , we break this down by revenue and expenses too, because you're probably likely to be good at some of this stuff and not others. Reality is that you're probably really, really good at coaching, but most of us are first time business owners when we open a gym. And that means we're not good at owning a gym. We're at eight outta 10 as a coach, and we're a zero as a business owner. That's okay. What's not okay is lying to yourself saying, I'll give it three years, or I'll figure it out as I go, or I'll build my wings on the way down. That is just a path to destruction. And the faster you figure this out, the sooner your gym will grow, your life will improve, and you'll be a real entrepreneur. The longer you wait to figure this out, the more expensive it gets to fix mistakes, and the more likely you are to burn out, flash , run outta money and close your gym. Let's start by going through the checklist. Let's see what you need. So on April 29th , uh, at noon eastern gym owners united.com , I'll be there live to walk you through this and answer questions. Let's get your gym rolling .