The 6 Reasons Gym Owners Fail

If your gym isn't paying you at least $100,000 a year, you need to listen to this podcast—or check it out on YouTube to see the visuals.

Chris Cooper shares the six reasons gym owners fail and provides the tools fitness entrepreneurs need to solve these problems.

Coop was a struggling gym owner, too, and this is the exact video that would have saved him 15 years ago when he was struggling to pay the rent as an overworked, underpaid gym owner.

The data-backed, battle-tested resources in this video have:

• Helped over 2,700 gym owners take home 24.9 percent more than the average gym owner.
• Produced almost 300 gym owners who earn six figures or more.
• Minted almost 60 new millionaires.

There’s no catch. Two-Brain leaves no gym behind. These resources are designed to give you a few quick wins and help you build momentum. Get our A+, gym-saving resource package today.

To move faster and accomplish your goals sooner, work with a mentor. A mentor analyzes your business and tells you exactly what to focus on right now so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Because all the knowledge in the world is useless without action.

Links

Free Tools Package for Gym Owners

Book a Strategy Session

Gym Owners United

1:11 - Problem 1: Inconsistent Lead Generation

4:27 - Problem 2: Charging Less Than You’re Worth

7:49 - Problem 3: High Churn

15:27 - Problem 4: Underpaying Yourself

16:49 - Problem 5: Flying Blind on the Numbers

21:43 - Problem 6: Finding and Keeping Great Staff

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Most gyms go out of business, and I don't want your gym to be one that fails. If you're a gym owner and you're stressed about money, we made this video for you. The truth is that running a successful gym is actually much simpler than you think. I know you might feel like you've got a thousand different problems, but they all fit into one of six buckets. So today, I'm gonna help you figure out which of these six problems you have, and better yet, I'm gonna show you how to solve the problem fast. One note, in this video, I'm going to be referencing a bunch of different documents and spreadsheets and training sessions that we have used to help thousands of gym owners get to the next level in business. You can download all of them for free by clicking on the link below this video. Now, a quick intro for context. I'm Chris Cooper, and I'm the founder of Two Brain Business. We are the world's largest gym mentorship practice. We work one-on-one with gym owners to help them build profitable businesses that they love. Last year, 288 gym owners in our program earned a six-figure income. That's take-home. You can check us out at twobrainbusiness.com if you're curious. Now, the first reason that gyms fail. The first problem is inconsistent lead generation. We know you can make six figures with 150 clients, so we set that as the first target for gym owners in our program. To get that, you need a reliable stream of leads that are interested in joining your gym. The problem is that most gym owners do some marketing, but the results are inconsistent. So if you need help growing your gym, I recommend starting with our one hour a day marketing plan for gym owners. In it, we break down the system that Two Brain Gyms use to get more leads without spending a dollar on paid ads. The guide lays out how to do it step by step and includes copy and paste scripts. The best part is that all the work can be done in just one hour a day. While I don't have time to go through the entire guide right now, let's go over the marketing assignment for Thursdays. When a gym owner struggles to get leads, we'll ask, how many people did you talk to about your gym today? And the answer is usually zero. At Two Brain, we say that more conversations equals more conversions. And Thursday's marketing plan is all about starting new conversations. We do that with our five by four plan. Okay, here's the five by four plan. Every Thursday, what you're going to do is DM five social media followers. You're going to contact five former clients. You're going to start five sell by chat conversations. And you're going to text five leads who came in and did a no sweat intro with you, but didn't convert. Okay, here's how to do that. First, you're going to DM five of your social media followers. Okay. You're going to message your five newest followers this, hey, thanks for the follow. Are you currently hitting the gym now? If they respond, follow the script in our ultimate sell by chat strategy for gym owners guide. So next you're going to contact five former clients and you're going to say, hey, are you interested in improving your fitness this season? You know, spring 2025 or whatever. And if they say yes, invite them to the gym to make a plan with you. Next, you're going to start five sell by chat conversations. So you're going to do something like this, make a post like this on your Facebook page or your Instagram profile or in a local Facebook group. Now, the bribe that you put in this post should be valuable to a prospective member, but shouldn't take too long for you to put together. The guide above can be made like in five minutes here. Other ideas might include the top five healthy lunch options in town or the top best three places to run in town or... any other helpful video or resource that you've made in the past. The key here is not to overthink these just to get something published. Respond to every comment using the script from the ultimate sell by chat strategy for gym owner's guide. Next, you're going to text five people who didn't convert. So they came in, they did a consultation and also an intro and they didn't buy. And you're going to say, hey, It's Coop here from the gym. Are you making any progress on the goal that you said earlier? Okay. So if there's not, then invite them to your gym to revisit the conversation. Now, this is a numbers game, but if you follow this framework, you'll add an additional 1,040 conversations over the course of one year. Now, I can guarantee that your gym will grow if you do just this one thing consistently. Now that we know how to attract more members, let's discuss the next problem that causes gyms to fail. And that is that you're charging less than you're worth. Average revenue per member is one of the most important metrics to track in a coaching gym. To figure out yours, divide your monthly revenue by your client count. So for example, if you have$20,000 in monthly revenue and 150 members, then your ARM is$133 per member per month, meaning that you make$133 per member in your gym each month. So now what happens when you increase the number by 30 and multiply it by your current client count? Well, wow, right? It's quite a big difference. We go from$20,000 in monthly revenue up to$24,000 and we haven't gained a single client yet. A simple tweak in pricing... or a small change in how you offer your service can lead to a massive increase in revenue without adding a single member. Raising rates is the fastest way to increase your ARM, but raising rates the wrong way can be catastrophic. That's why we put out the Essential Rate Raising Starter Kit for Gym Owners. In it, you'll learn the seven rules of rate increases. This hard-earned knowledge was developed from coaching thousands of gym owners through successful rate increases. Additionally, we'll walk you through an exercise that will help optimize your pricing while minimizing cancellations. If raising rates is too scary for you, we've put together a playbook for adding$10,000 in personal training revenue without adding a single member to your gym. The key to this process is mastering goal review sessions. Here's how those work. Every three to six months, you should have a 15 to 20 minute meeting with each client to review their goals. During those meetings, you'll write down the client's goal and set up a plan for tracking progress. If a client could progress faster toward a goal with personal training, just say so. That's our job as coaches. Here's the exact line that I use. The best way for you to speed up your progress is to add a one-on-one session with me every month where I give you a little extra homework. Okay, that's it. You'll get one of these two responses after you suggest adding a one-on-one session. The client will ask for a price and tell you to add the PT session to their monthly bill. That's a big win because your average revenue per member just jumped. Or the client will ask you for the price and say, I can't do that right now. And you'll say, no problem. you're still gonna make progress with your current plan. So let's meet again in three months, interview your progress, and if you wanna speed it up then, we'll sort that out. What this is doing is laying the foundation for a future win. The client now knows where the accelerator is, the thing that will speed up their progress, and they can stomp on it anytime they want. In two brain gyms, Three out of every 10 clients will upgrade their service by about 30% in goal review sessions. And if you don't want to raise rates or add personal training to your gym, we put together a guide with the top 20 battle-tested tactics to raise your ARM, your average revenue per member. Just implementing one or two of the tactics in this guide could increase your ARM by 20%, which, based on our data, would add an additional$59,870 in revenue to the average large group coaching gym. That's not bad. The third problem is high churn. Let me ask you a question. If a gym has 150 members and 9% monthly churn, how many of those members will remain in one year? The answer is 48. So if your gym has 9% monthly churn, you will lose 68% of your membership in one year. That means you'll have to sell 102 memberships just to break even. Churn is the killer of profits. Lower churn makes it way easier to grow your business. Most gym owners spend too much time thinking about getting more customers and not enough time trying to keep the customers that they already have. And while the exact figures vary, studies suggest that acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an old customer. And that's why we obsess over retention and churn at Two Brain. And it's also why the average Two Brain gym retains its members 13 months longer than the average gym. Here's our secret. Retention has five equally important pillars. If you're missing one, your building will be unstable. If you're missing two, you won't keep a roof over your head. I'll give you a simple strategy that you can use to shore up each one of these pillars. If you want the step-by-step playbook, download the never lose a client again guide. So first of all, if clients aren't getting the results they came in to get, they will quit and their right to quit. The prescriptive model is really our solution to that. In the prescriptive model, clients come in, through a sales process that we call the no sweat intro. And you ask them some questions about why they're at the gym. Like, you know, what are your goals? You measure their starting point and then you make a prescription. You say, okay, well to get from point A to point B, here's the best thing that you can do. How does that sound? When they agree with your prescription, you present the price. If they don't like the price, then you can make a new prescription. You can downgrade it and just explain it. It'll take a little bit longer or you can start them. Then from there, you're going to make another appointment to meet them in about three months where you're going to measure their progress and update their prescription. Nobody gets the prescription right the first time. It's impossible. You have to dial it in. But this keeps you ahead of that client engagement conversation. And it means that your prescription gets better and better and better. And the client has some sunk costs. They don't want to go start over with somebody else. The fame pillar... is really, really important. This is probably the only place in the world where your clients will feel famous, like they're doing things right, where they feel important, where people are talking about them and telling their story. And so you have to establish two routines. First, you have to measure their progress. And second, you have to have them think about their progress and acknowledge it. Because if they're on the inside, they might not see the progress happening. So you have to take them out of their head, show them their progress. Here you are, congratulations. The solution to this is called Bright Spots Friday. And this is just kind of your safety net. What you're going to do every Friday is have your clients post what their wins were for the week. This puts their brain on pause. It stops that trap of comparison to other clients. And they have to stop and think back, like, what did I do right this week or what went right this week? That stops a mistake that we call gap in the gain, where instead of measuring the gap between where they wanna be and where they are right now, they're actually looking backward and measuring the gains to see how far they've come. This is a very simple strategy and you can do it way better even in a goal review, but this is a simple safety net that you can use with all of your clients. And once you really get the ball rolling, It just comes natural to people and you don't have to maintain it anymore. The third pillar of retention is compatibility. And if you're going to keep a client for a long time, the answer to the following four questions should be a yes. Number one, can this person afford your service? Number two, do they like you? Number three, are they a good fit with your other clients? And number four, can you help them reach their goals? If none of these are happening or any of them aren't happening, then this next exercise is for you. This is called the pumpkin plan. What you're trying to do is grow your gym by replicating your very best clients. It's tempting to try and get everybody and anybody when you're desperate for clients. But if you do that, you'll get some incompatible people and it's impossible to retain them long-term. They'll just churn out. So then they leave and then you need more clients and you're back on that hamster wheel again. But if you identify and replicate your best clients, it's much easier to retain them because you already know that they're a perfect fit for your business and they know it too. They can afford your service. They mix well with your current members and your business is set up to help them accomplish their goals. And a bonus is they're high value clients too. Here's how to find them. First, take a piece of paper and draw a line right down the center. On one side of that line, List your five to 10 highest paying clients. These are the people who want everything that you're selling plus three t-shirts for their friends. On the other side of that line, list your five to 10 favorite clients. These are the people who show up with batteries included and they always brighten your day. They feed you with energy. Now, identify the people who appear on both lists and circle those names. These are your best clients. And if you look at this list, you want to find more people like Harris and Liam and Erica. In our mentorship program, we have an exact plan to help you do that too. The fourth pillar of retention is consistency. If your clients don't show up regularly, they soon won't show up at all. And so you have to measure adherence to make sure that they're showing up. But more than that, you have to do goal review sessions because not only do they raise your ARM, but they also reduce churn. They improve arm and leg length of engagement. Along with goal review sessions, Ensure that you have a system for tracking and reaching out to missing members. Adherence, the amount of times they show up, is also really important for keeping them. And the fifth pillar of retention is referrals. This is the one that a lot of people don't think about, but Cindy isn't going to quit your gym if all of her best friends are already members. The people who refer you to their friends stay longer. They build their own support network, but within the gym. Some great ideas for this are bring a friend day. You can only do these about once a quarter or it just becomes this freebie that people start, it's like they're clipping coupons. They only come on Saturday because it's the free day or whatever. Do a wine and wad so people can come in and sample things. Do a corporate challenge. This is what I love. You talk to your members who own a little business or they work at an accounting firm or they work at a dentist's office and you invite their coworkers or their employees in. You throw a fun little party for them. They do a couple of physical challenges. You take their picture and then you talk to them about joining the gym. That's all, okay? So now that you understand the five pillars, you can identify which one of these is your weakest and start working on fixing that one before moving into the next pillar. While this work might not be the most exciting work in the world for you, it doesn't always appear as sexy as marketing, you have to remember that retention is just sales over time. Your job is to convince the person to keep coming, to keep coming back, to come again tomorrow, to come again next week. This pays well. I mean, the longer you keep somebody, the more profitable your gym will be. A study that we conducted at Two Brain showed that an average gym owner would take home an extra$45,000 a year by just increasing their average member retention by just two months. If you kept every client in your gym two months longer than you normally would have, that should give you an extra$45,000 in take home. The fourth problem is underpaying yourself. Most of us open gyms to change lives, not to chase riches. That passion often puts members and staff ahead of our own paychecks, and it wrecks our finances. Hey, I know, I did it. Too many great owners and coaches quit the industry simply because they can't make a decent living. To keep helping people, you must run a profitable, secure business. And that's why Two Brain's first rule is simple. Pay yourself first. From our experience, we know that many gym owners struggle to pay themselves a fair wage because their business model is broken. And that's why we put together five ways to make$100,000 a year from your gym. That's take home to you. Inside that guide, you'll find training videos and step-by-step guides that walk you through five proven business models that Two Brain Gyms use to take home$100,000 per year with 150 members or less. Each model has a sample profit and loss statement and a staffing blueprint so you know exactly what to do. Once you've worked through your model, check out the Give Yourself a Raise guide and implement one of the four tactics in there. I recommend starting with number three because it can save you over$10,000 in taxes. But here's the Most owners don't even know what they actually pay themselves because their books are a blur. And that leads straight to problem number five, flying blind on the numbers. Hiring your staff, buying equipment, and reinvesting in your business are essential. But if you're like most gym owners, you have probably found yourself in a situation where you've overhired or overspent. And when cash runs thin, the easiest bill to skip is your own pay, And over time, that just leads to burnout. A clear P&L, a profit and loss, tells you whether you can hire another coach and what you can afford to pay them, move into a bigger space to expand your business, and invest in new equipment without wiping out your profit. And that's why we built the P&L Primer Guide. This is a sample micro gym profit and loss. It's a basic financial document that's kind of like the steering wheel of your business. This is what you use to make decisions instead of following your gut or chasing ideas. We give you a copy of this in the mentorship program very early for a couple of reasons. Number one, we really want to help you fill it out. Number two, we want you to be comfortable using it because if you're comfortable using it, it's like being comfortable driving your car. This is how you take control. If you don't know how to use this, and I've been there, I was like, I don't want to be an accountant. I want to run my gym. I want to be a coach. But if you don't know how to use this, you're not really driving the car. You're always at the mercy of external events or luck or good marketing. And you never really know when something is working and when it's not. You're making guesses instead of making informed decisions.

UNKNOWN: 18:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:29

So we give you a sample of this and you can turn right around and give this to your bookkeeper. They can set up your QuickBooks or whatever, your accounting software to match this. We can even feed it directly into our Two Brain dashboard every month so that you don't have to manually enter this stuff. But just like changing your tires, even if you never plan on changing your tires yourself, you should know how to do it so that you're not stuck alone in the dark somewhere. Let me just run you through what a profit and loss statement is. The profit and loss statement is broken down to track your money, where it comes from, where it's going, and what's left over. First, where it's coming from. This is your revenue. So this is where you want to break down how many members you have, your average membership price. You can calculate the total revenue that you're bringing in each month, and you can see your ARM. I'm going to come back and show you a little trick with this in a moment. The next part is your expenses. Where's your money going? And I'm just going to hit a little... Little button here so you can see something here. Okay, so you can go line by line through your expenses and see where your money's going. If you're paying for affiliation, maybe that's here. You know, cleaning, what are you paying? What are you paying for your insurance? Put it here. What are you, you know, putting towards your marketing? What's your actual rent? You know, what's your merchant fees? Change that here, okay? so that you know exactly where your money is going. Because if you're anything like me, before I started looking at this, I didn't have control of my business. And so all I would see is my business bank account. And quite often I would be too scared to even look at that for fear there was nothing in there. And so you want to know like, well, how come I've got all these clients and money's coming in, but like there's nothing left over at the end of the month. This will tell you exactly where that money is going. And you should be looking at this once a month so that you know, not because you're making mistakes, not because people are stealing from you, but because you need to know where the money's coming from and where it's going and why it's different this month than last, okay? So this is the part of the P&L that tells you where your money is going, okay? And this part too, this is your staff pay. I said earlier, your biggest investment. Now we've set this P&L up in 2Brain so that it automatically calculates how much you're paying for classes, how much you're paying your coaches for personal training or nutrition coaching or whatever, how much you're paying coaches to do other things like social media or admin or cleaning or the CSM job or whatever that is, and what the total is here. Then we want to know how much is going to you. So this is, you know, you are the best investment that your gym can make. You're the best investment that you can make in yourself. But we want to know how much you're making from a salary and how much you're making to coach classes. Because if you decide to coach less or coach more, you need to adjust this to see what will happen. And then finally, owner pay. Now, we built this out for a gym owner just like you to see them, show them, like, if they want to earn 100K a year, how many clients do they need at what ARM? This is a skill that a university would charge you probably about$60,000 to learn. We want you to have this skill forever because you can't run a great business without it. And once you've mastered it, you're way ahead of everybody else. Now that we know how much we can afford to spend on our team, let's move on to problem number six, which is finding and keeping great staff. Most of us open a gym to coach, and then we woke up to find out that we were also the cleaner and the sales guy and the CFO and the front desk person. To grow, we need to hire and retain a great team, but most entrepreneurs struggle to delegate. And that's where the value ladder comes in. This guide provides a 10-step process for identifying when you're ready to hire and what you can afford to pay. Once you finish that, our hiring plan and job descriptions give you copy and paste ads for every role from CEO down to cleaner, pay ranges tied to profit margins, and hiring tips for each position. Be sure to click the link below this video to get all of these tools for free. No strings attached. If you're overwhelmed, don't worry. That's common. Business is complicated, but I can solve that problem for you too. Two Brain Business is a mentorship practice. A mentor reduces overwhelm and stress by keeping you focused on the most important task right now. Sometimes it's hard to see the path when you're in the middle of a storm, and that's why you need a guide. Our mentors evaluate businesses and prescribe clear, data-based actions that get results. Every resource that we discuss in this video works, and 2Brain has hundreds of additional resources available to our clients. The stuff in the free toolkit is just a small sample. Our mentors help gym owners use the right tool at the right time, and the results are incredible. And I'll show you some results in a second here. If you want to book a strategy session with somebody on my team, go to gymmentor.com or click the link in the video description. And now, here are some real gym owners who will tell you what can happen if you take action on what you've learned today.

SPEAKER_07: 23:31

So over the course of the year, our revenue went from about 32K a month to up over, we've been steady over 50,000 a month now.

SPEAKER_00: 23:42

We have more than doubled our revenue. I don't coach any classes. I don't coach any PTs. I don't coach any nutrition clients.

SPEAKER_01: 23:49

The best part was my payroll doubled, which means I created opportunities for all of my staff to earn more and do exactly what they love. And that was from all the programs that I learned and all the connections that I made through Two Brain in the last year.

SPEAKER_03: 24:00

Just having a mentor to help me stay focused on something specific and how much that impacts my business is priceless. Almost tripled our revenue from when we started.

SPEAKER_05: 24:09

And starting with Two Brain from day minus 60 before I launched my gym. was like the best investment I made, hands down, hands down.

SPEAKER_08: 24:17

I've tripled my net owner benefit, taking home and providing for my family well over six figures, changing my lifestyle, changing my life.

SPEAKER_06: 24:24

The biggest win is making the shift so that we could actually be a profitable business and actually not be worried about closing down every time that there's a little bit of adversity.

SPEAKER_04: 24:34

Now I'm home every night. I have more time with my wife and my kids, and I don't have to worry that things are falling apart at the gym.

SPEAKER_06: 24:41

I earn back my investment in less than two months and then ascended into levels that I never could have imagined.