How These Gyms Generate Over $60K in Monthly Revenue

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper explains how the Top 10 gyms on the revenue leaderboard drive consistent, high-level monthly income.

These gyms have moved beyond the "group only" model to add high-value services such as personal training, small-group training and semi-private training. Some gyms are generating significant revenue with challenges and special events that include gamification to drive retention.

Chris shares what the top performers have in common—such as strong client avatars, structured annual planning and a focus on delivering measurable results—and explains why mentorship is a key part of their stories.

He also serves up quotes and tactical insights directly from gym owners who are generating $61,000-$114,000 per month.

Aiming for a big revenue milestone? This episode will show you what’s possible and help you start working toward your goal today.

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1:26 - Top 10 revenue leaderboard

2:53 - What the Top 10 have in common

8:06 - Tips from revenue leaders

9:45 - Gamification and challenges

15:42 - Success is possible

Transcript

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But so that you can see... hey, there is an opportunity for me here in the fitness industry. And so today I'm going to share our monthly leaderboard show where I collect data from all thousand two brain gyms and I share who's doing the best. And then I interview them and I tell you, here's how they did it because I want to help you grow your gym too. It's not just about how many clients you can get anymore. It really comes down to how profitable is your gym. That's what determines how long you can stick around. And one of the keys to profitability is revenue, regardless of how many clients you have. If you can do$20,000 a month with one client or$20,000 a month with 200 clients, it's the same revenue and possibly a little bit less work. There are pros and cons to both. I'm going to share all of that today. This is Run a Profitable Gym. If you want to ask questions about this episode, or you want to talk about the leaders, or maybe even meet some of them, you can go to gymownersunited.com. That's our free group where we give free help to gym owners every single day. Now, let's get into the leaderboard. I'm going to start with who's actually making the most revenue in Two Brain. The 10th place revenue, and these are all in US dollars because I want to compare apples to apples. First, we have a gym in the US that did$61,341 in revenue last month. Congratulations. Ninth place, we had a gym do$63,623 in revenue last month. They are from the Netherlands, but again, this is in USD. Eighth place,$67,530 US last month. They're US. Seventh place,$70,115. This is a Canadian gym, but that's US dollars that they collected, which translates into well over$100,000 Canadian. Sixth place was a gym from Belgium,$72,743 last month. Fifth place was another gym in the US,$74,266. Fourth place was another gym in the US,$78,710. Third place was another gym in the US at$84,834. Second place, a gym from Denmark,$92,447 US last month in revenue. And first place from the States,$114,660. Now this is not the CrossFit Games. It's not about who can climb the leaderboard. It's how are they doing it so that we can copy what they're doing and do it in our own gyms. And so first, I'm going to give you the common themes that were shared with me by all 10 of these gyms about how they're doing it. First, The days of we just sell group fitness are over. Our leaders all have diverse revenue streams with some very high value services on the menu. And that pulls up their gross revenue. It also pulls up their average revenue per member. The exact service packages can vary from gym to gym. I'm going to share some of them with you in a moment. But these gyms all generate these huge revenue numbers by giving their clients the options to pick what they want. Not everybody wants group training. Not everybody wants personal training. but giving people the options is what drives revenue up and makes it easy for people to buy. And that means that clients can pay more for more attention or special programs if they want, and the gym earns more without the gym owner trying to guess what the average person or what everybody wants. Second, semi-private training and small group training are increasingly prominent in our top gyms for revenue. This used to be the domain of the gyms with the high ARM. They were selling their coaching for$300,$400,$500 a month, doing it in semi-private or small group sessions. But now they're actually taking over the leaderboard for gross revenue as more and more top gym owners are using these high value services to offer clients more attention, generate more revenue per hour, maximize revenue in the square footage that they have. and solve the I'm out of hours to coach problem. Also, especially in my gym, coaches love earning more than 25 bucks an hour and sometimes the coach can earn 80 to 100. I'm not saying that semi-private is the choice for every single gym and you should drop the group coaching model. I often get accused of saying that I'm anti-group coaching. That's not true. I am anti-gyms failing and I want to give you the methods and strategies that are going to work and that are working for the best gyms in the world. In Two Brain, our mentorship practice, we help clients identify and set these revenue streams up. So for example, one of our leaders made this board without using semi-private training, and he's going to be working with our specialist on semi-private training tomorrow so that gym has even more room to grow. I can't wait to see their next revenue total. But other gyms did this with some group training and some personal training. Some gyms did this with some semi-private and some group. Some gyms have all three. Their model is flexible and our mentor works with you to deliver the model that they want. While the standard revenue streams are generally group, personal training, small group, or semi-private, some of the leaders are using special events to generate significant revenue. They're running nutrition challenges and competitions on a schedule regularly, which is key. They have a great plan. They've built that plan with their mentor and they're executing on the plan. So they never have these dips and low months. So that's the key to the leaderboard is that the people who are on it generating$70,000 to$100,000 a month, they didn't just have one big month, one fluke where they sold a bunch of prepaid memberships or one bait and switch six week thing that nobody ever keeps or keeps clients from. They're not just randomly announcing a challenge because revenue looks weak and they're desperate. What they're doing is building a plan for the whole year so that these high revenue months are consistent. And if you compare this revenue leaderboard with a leaderboard three months from now, you're going to find a lot of the same gyms because they're just building and building and building. So these special events and these special challenges, they're planned in advance and they're so well-planned and that they're marketed and they can generate$8,000 to$13,000 by themselves. And that's more gross revenue than a lot of gyms. It doesn't mean you should run a fitness competition or a nutrition challenge every single month, but what if you ran a special event every quarter or every six months and tacked$20,000 to$40,000 onto your annual revenue? What would that do for your gym? Another very interesting feature that's popping up is gamification. So some of our leaders are using apps, leaderboards, and trackers to make fitness feel like a game for clients that have lots of ways to win. That's a huge deal. I can remember when we started doing group coaching as a new CrossFit gym, we had this whiteboard and you had like your daily leaderboard on there. There are apps that do that right now. And those are very effective for new clients. But The goal of whatever is happening on the leaderboard has to align with the client's actual goal. That novelty will wear out. And so what these gyms are doing is they're gamifying the client's ultimate outcomes. Clients don't need to finish first in Fran anymore. They get to win if they get to bed on time, they pass on the booze, or they get their heart rate up outside the gym, stuff like that. That's what you want to measure. Here's the clever part. If you encourage these behaviors outside the gym, clients develop healthy habits and they get better results inside the gym and you get credit for all of it. And so they move toward their goals faster and the gym improves its retention. Crazy, crazy, crazy important. So here's the question to think about. How could you gamify the experience at your gym to help clients have more fun and get better results? I just did a training inside 2Brand called Build Your Own Belt System, which was enormously popular. And we also have some great partners in Level Method, for example, that can help you out with this. So here are some quotes from the leaders on the leaderboard this month. First one said... Our revenue comes from traditional, predictable personal training and membership fees. We also run a nutrition challenge and a competition. The competition generates$13,000 twice a year. We've been running that for over a decade with 140 to 150 athletes. Amazing. Stick to the basics and keep getting better and better and better instead of always trying to add the new thing. The second person said our revenue is 70% group, 20% small group, 5% personal training, and 5% on-ramp. There's your business plan right there. Let me repeat that again. 70% of their revenue comes from group, 20% comes from small group, 5% personal training, and 5% they're on-ramp. If that's all you did for the next five years, your gym would grow. Next, this person said, we're a personal training studio. Five years ago, we had three part-time coaches. Now we have 11 and eight full-time coaches, two part-time and one physio. So out of the 11, eight are full-time, two are part-time, and one physio. Our revenue comes from one-on-one, some two-on-one, and some small group. which is the lowest level of revenue at our gym. So there's many ways to do this. The key is to work with a mentor who's gonna look at your profit and loss, look at your actual metrics and help you build a plan to grow the gym that you want. The next person said, we're looking now to go to the semi-private concept and we have a call with two brain specialist, Brian Bott. Another person said, we also offer boxing and Thai boxing, which is always done one-on-one or one-on-two. People really love it and they have the feeling that they can get better at it. It's no contact, they're just using pads. Next, I want to go deeper on this gamification and challenges because I've talked about it a bit already. And so I asked the leaders on the leaderboard for some direct quotes. Here's what they said. The first said, we've gamified nutrition. So instead of weight loss goals, we provide people with more ways to win. We use a point system in an app. We asked how do we get more engagement with the key drivers outside the gym? And so we track seven daily health points. They are sleep, water, protein, movement, alcohol, whole foods, and timed eating. And this makes it more fun. We race to 200 health points and we have a leaderboard. Amazing. The key here is that they're not trying to set the best Fran time or Murph time or the biggest deadlift in your gym. They're trying to do the best thing that will actually create change in their life over time. This is helping the clients best. It's taking the addictive strategies of gamification and applying them to health. Amazing. The next leaderboard person said, we run a mile a day May, simple consistency challenge and plan to run something similar once per quarter. Again, they're ingraining basic habits in their clients that will actually matter to the clients. The clients will see results from and will create long-term change. The next person said, Amazing. You're helping the client. They're getting measurable results and you're making it fun. The fourth person said, Our clients get to feel like kids. We've gamified heart rate using the MyZone heart rate monitor with tracking on the screens. We have a leaderboard of people who are most active in a week. And sometimes we do challenges like males versus females or morning class versus noon class all around heart rate. That's great. And I love that you're gamifying it based on their actions instead of their outcomes. Trying to be the best box squatter in your gym is motivating for the three people who are in the running to be the best box squatter. Trying to be the person who sticks to their habits is available to anybody. Anybody can win that challenge and everybody wins when they participate. I love it so much. The next set of comments were really about focusing on avatar. I grouped these together to make the point. The first gym on our revenue leaderboard said, we're privileged to be in an affluent and busy neighborhood. We relentlessly focus on the beginner and the average athlete delivering shame-free fitness. We do not program for the best and scale for the rest. And they put that in quotes. What that means is that they are not targeting elite people, but they are building high levels, maybe even elite levels of fitness in the average person by knowing their avatar really well. Look, there's a reason that Planet Fitness or whoever it is has the lunk alarm and the lunk-free zone. They do that because it works. And if you want to work with average people, that kind of messaging can't hurt you, right? If you say like, we are not about serving the elite person who's going for competition, we want average people, that's not bad. But if you are very, very specific about the people that you want to serve, beginners and average athletes, you're going to go farther. The more you narrow your niche, the higher your value to that niche. The next person said, I stay away from nutrition. I don't think touching that topic creates a safe space and I stay in my lane. My revenue does not involve any nutrition or supplements. Great. So the reason that I included this quote, and I think it's so important is that you can build the gym that you want to build and still be one of the top 10 gyms in the world for revenue. If you have a plan and you build that plan with a mentor to help you get really clear on what your plan is, what you sell and what you don't sell, who you serve and who you don't serve. And then you can build the gym that you want. You don't have to do what all these people are doing. You can not focus on nutrition or you can focus on nutrition. The next person I keep our group small. but they also know that it's going to go to a good cause. So they use it as an incentive. That's great. But the key here is that adding value means decreasing group size. The bigger your group, the less perceived value by every person in there. Even if you can give them a full minute of coaching, they will still tend to feel like they're on an assembly line. In a small group, the value increases, the price goes up, and so does the revenue. The next person said, we offer great vibes and we do a lot of team building. I serve lots of business owners and they like the positive professional vibes. No males walking around shirtless. I think this is really important. This person is also really great at nailing who their avatar is. I'm a business owner. There's a lot of business owners in my semi-private program. They're not there to chat business. They do have that in common, but what they expect is professionalism, They expect us to get the basics right every single time. They don't expect to be crushed, but they also do expect results. And so getting the basics right and knowing who your avatar is, no matter who that is, is really, really, really important. If your avatar is people over 50, you should know that. You should define that, and that increases the value of your service. Finally, one person said that they really focus on maximizing revenue per square foot, and this has led them to maximizing revenue overall. They said, we have 208 clients in 400 square meters, which is about 4,300 square feet, and we're at the edge of capacity. So what will this gym owner do if they're smart? They won't double their space and double their equipment and double their costs. What they'll do is increase their value to those clients, increase their rates, increase their revenue without taking on any of those other expenses. and they'll increase their profit and they'll increase what they can pay their coaches to. Look, the reason that we do this is to help you. If you learned anything from this session, it's that success is possible for you. Even if your gym is doing less than$10,000 a month, you could one day be on these leaderboards. The real difference, the common thread to all of these leaders is that they got mentorship. They got an outside perspective that helped them get really clear about where they wanted to go and then help them break down the steps to get there. The mentor defined the path. They're working the path. They're doing it consistently. They're not trying something different every month. They're getting better and better and better at the path that works for them. And it's taking them right to the top of our revenue leaderboard. I hope this helps you. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. Go to gymownersunited.com. That's our free group. If you want to do free webinars every few weeks and get our free resources and talk about what the top leaders, the top gym owners in the world are doing.