Knowledge Isn’t Enough: Why Gym Owners Need Mentorship

Knowledge won’t grow your gym—action will.

In this episode, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper explains how to close the gap between learning and doing so you can move your business forward.

For gym owners, the cost of inaction is high: wasted payroll, lost revenue, clogged marketing funnels and low retention.

Chris has seen thousands of gym owners get stuck in a cycle of compounding mistakes—not because they lacked information but because they didn't have someone to help them sort through the info and figure out what to do "right now."

The solution? Building a clear plan for your gym with an expert mentor who will tell you exactly what to do and hold you accountable for doing it.

If you’ve been consuming videos, blogs and books without making progress in your business, tune in to find out what separates growing gyms from stagnant gyms.

Links

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0:32 - The implementation gap

1:31 - The cost of inaction

3:54 - How mistakes compound

4:49 - Value of an outside perspective

7:38 - Why Chris still has mentors

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey, I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and I know you. You're not lazy. You're probably learning more than ever about running a gym. But learning isn't enough. I've been providing free help to gym owners for 16 years. Books, podcasts, blog posts, templates, tools. Some people use it and succeed. And most people collect it. They save it for later. And later never comes. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the implementation gap and how to actually make the changes that will grow your business. The implementation gap is the space between what you learn and what you do. If you learn 50 things this year, but you implement zero, what does that do for your business? I'll give you a challenge here. Think of the last five things that you learned from listening to a podcast or you read in a book. Did you implement any of them? And that's why mentorship matters. We close that implementation gap between knowledge and action. Jim wrote famously said, don't let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action. And I have that printed in my office because like me, you don't need more ideas. You need to act on one great idea consistently again and again, and focus on getting better at that instead of jumping from one thing that you're bad at to another one that you're just trying for the first time and failing. This is how mentorship gets you 10 times further, 10 times faster. So first, let's talk about the real cost of not taking action because sometimes we use the accumulation of knowledge as an excuse to not take action. Well, I want to finish this book before I start working on it. Actually, I'm going to listen to three more podcasts on the topic before I launch that thing. Here's some examples of how much pausing and waiting actually costs you in your gym because waiting has a price. For example, if you hire people without written roles and tasks and evaluation forms and contracts, that can easily cost you$100,000 in wasted payroll as that person quickly churns out. If you don't have a pricing binder, that's probably costing you$5,000 a month in lost sales. And if you have a weak website, then every dollar and every second of time you spend on marketing is probably wasted. These are mistakes that people don't realize they're making until it's too late. I'll give you another great one. Pricing based on what your competition is doing or what you think your process is worth without help from a mentor, without looking at a P&L, that's probably costing you$5,000 to$8,000 in revenue a month because you guessed instead of actually working things out with math. And so when a lot of people come into Two Brain, they think like, I'm doing okay, I'm treading water, I'm holding even, I'm maintaining, but they're actually going backward. So they're wasting money on staff that's not going to stick around. They're wasting money on ads. that have no effect because their website stinks or they don't have a good sales process. They're wasting money trying to get all these clients in and not keeping them. And they're wasting money on the wrong model. They're going down the wrong path as fast as they can. An example from my own gym is the first four or five coaches that I hired between 2005 and 2009 were hired without any written... tasks to complete. They had no checklist. They didn't know how to do a 10 out of 10, A plus job. They came in and worked hard. They showed up when I did very early and they stayed till late and they trained a lot of clients and I was still dissatisfied. And they would sense that dissatisfaction and they would just turn out. They would think like, I'm doing a bad job. I'm working as hard as I can. My dad says I should get a job in the post office. Why don't I just do that? It's so much easier. And my boss isn't angry all the time. And so I wasted easily$100,000 on hiring people who didn't stay because it was my fault. The next problem that happens is that these mistakes compound. So very few of us make just one mistake in business. We hire the wrong people, we have a bad website, we're doing bad marketing, we have bad sales processes, our retention sucks, and all these things multiply on one another. If your retention sucks, then your staff is gonna wanna leave sooner. If your sales process is really, really weak, then you're gonna get frustrated with all these cold, leads who don't want to buy. And then you get burned out too. And so these mistakes just compound and compound until you're so overwhelmed that you want to get out. And let's face it, more knowledge just adds to that overwhelm. Gee, maybe the thing that I read in that book I should be doing. Oh, I know I should be doing this. You start to feel guilty because you're not getting results and you know what to do, but you're not doing it. Without mentorship, your errors, your mistakes, your waiting compounds and it multiplies on each other So here's the next problem. You start trusting your own opinions too much because you know the right thing to do, but you just don't do it. I'm sure you've got clients like this in the gym. They come in and they're like, oh yeah, by the way, I have Achilles tendonitis or I have this problem with me. And you say, okay, did your doctor say that? No, no, no. I Googled it. Oh, did your physiotherapist say that? No, no, no. Chat GPT said this is probably what's wrong with me. And of course, doctors aren't perfect, but they're way more accurate than the average person. And that's because they have an objective perspective as well as their knowledge so that they can tell you exactly what to do and prescribe the action required to fix the problem. See, when we're living in our heads like we do all day every day now, it's very easy to come up with the first answer and convince ourselves that that's right. Or to read a book and think like, wow, that's the solution. We have novelty biases. We have self-perception biases. We have scarcity biases. And these often guide us down the wrong trail 100 miles an hour because they can convince us that we're doing the right thing, even when it's only the voice in our head. And business is the same. We project our feelings and our budget and our perspective and our experience onto everybody else. That's why you need an outside expert to help you see the real problem. Otherwise, you keep treating chest colds when you've got lung cancer. Now, look, I've had a lot of conversations, thousands of them, with gym owners, whether they were in our program or not. And quite often, 75% of the time, they say, I just need more leads. But the problem is the same problem I had in 2009. You can get a lead to come into your gym and not sell them. Maybe the gym is messy. Maybe you're all sweaty from your workout. Maybe you don't know what to say. Maybe you spend an hour trying to convince them and you never get to the point. Maybe you don't even make a clear offer. Maybe you run a free trial and you hope that they'll just toss their credit card not you on the way out the door. None of this stuff works. But inside your own head, you think, man, I'm working really hard. I'm trying really hard. Why don't they see it? Because you see it. You have to be able to see things from other people's perspective, and that is extremely hard when you live inside your own head all day. We project our knowledge of fitness onto people coming into the gym. We think that they understand why a GLP-1 might not be the answer. They don't. They don't have anything near our level of knowledge. That's called the technician's curse. But the key is that they think they do. They think they know all about fitness, just like we, first-time entrepreneurs, think we know all there is to know about business because we listen to a leadership book that told us to just grind harder and eat the frog or something like that, right? The key here is that you need objective perspective. Just like your clients need an objective perspective to help them on their journey, you need that in your business. I use mentors still. It's been 20 years since I opened my gym. I have a Over a decade since I started mentoring other gym owners, I have many mentors that will help me. They're all paid. I listen to all of them. They all are very specific. And that's how I've grown the largest gym mentorship practice in the world. Not because I'm smart, not because I had the best idea at the right time, or I'm more creative, or I'm a harder worker. None of those things. It's because I have a coach. And that coach sees things from outside my own head. Look, you might think I just need more time or more energy or more information to make a decision, but you've probably already tried all those things. And there's a reason that you're not taking action. You're not doing it. And it's not just because you don't know what to do or how to act next, right? That's what mentorship gives you is a guide, a prescription, and accountability. I've got a lot of stories, hundreds of stories that I can share about mentorship guiding a gym owner to turn their gym around. Look, mentors don't come in and be your CEO. They don't change your gym for you. They guide you to do it, which gives you the long-term skills to be a good gym owner. And that, to me, is the real value of mentorship. You can learn lessons from a book, but not like what you can learn from actually running your own business and fixing your own mistakes. And that's what mentorship helps you do. That's why working with a mentor for a couple of years can make you a great gym owner for decades. I want you to stop drowning in content. Stop confusing knowledge with growth. Close the gap. Get a mentor. Make changes and grow your business. And later this week, I'm going to explain why it's so important for every gym owner to grow instead of to fail. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And if you want to get some help for free, go to gymownersunited.com. We share actionable steps, tools, tactics in that group. We do webinars. We answer Q&As for free every single week.