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
Revenue Secrets: Gamification and Annual Planning for Massive Months
John Bartholomeo, one of Two-Brain’s Top 10 leaders, added $15,000 in monthly revenue through annual planning and smart gamification of challenges at Mohawk Valley Wellness.
Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” he shares how his gym uses simple, repeatable systems to run revenue-generating nutrition challenges and events that clients love.
These events aren’t last-minute attempts to fill revenue gaps. They're part of a clearly defined annual plan that's created each year in collaboration with a mentor to drive engagement, retention and profitability.
John reveals how he turns nutrition into a competitive game, using streaks and point systems to boost client results, consistency and fun. He also explains how challenges help onboard new clients and support long-term retention.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to bring in more revenue. Tune in to find out how predictable planning and mentorship can improve your gym’s bottom line.
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1:08 - $15K per month in additional revenue
3:44 - Planning events and challenges
6:60 - Gamifying nutrition challenges
15:47 - Converting to ongoing programs
18:51 - Where mentorship fits in
I'll see you next time. and talk about big group training, small group training, semi-private training, personal training. We don't step outside that very often, but John's found a way to put some great stuff together to boost his revenue, and we're going to talk about that today. John, welcome. How is it today?
SPEAKER_02:Outstanding, Mike. Super excited to be here and dive into all things events and nutrition challenges and share.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because we talk about training a lot. And I'll tell you, back in the day when I looked at my books and something was looking really bad on the revenue line, I'm like, I need a challenge. I need to do a competition. And you put something like that in there. But you're doing something completely different. And I'm going to get our listeners on your page so that they can understand how this can become a big boost to revenue. So let's do the numbers first. What are your main revenue streams? Do you have an approximate breakdown of what goes into your gross? What are we looking at here?
SPEAKER_02:Yep. So the numbers that we're going to reference are May's numbers and a breakdown of that$74 80% of that is from what you would look as generally accepted gym revenue, right? Group class, small group training, personal training, things along those lines. But then about 20% of that, so almost another 15K came from two sources, one being an event and the other being a nutrition challenge. So like you hit the nail on the head, the bedrock is the recurring, a general gym membership, but a nice 20% chunk is above and beyond. And we found a pretty cool way to do it in a systematic way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And that's the important part, because again, I often would throw in six week challenges or some other stuff when I saw a hole coming or like my summer was looking bad or something like that. And these things were unpredictable. And I, you know, you just launched something. You don't know if it's going to be a good thing or a bad thing. You're not sure what it's going to bring in. It was not predictable revenue, but when you have something tied to an annual plan, you've established it, you know how to run it. It becomes a different story altogether. We're going to dig into that listener. So you can understand how John makes this money with some very clever tactics. So like I said, many gyms do this desperation tactic. Why did you decide to start running events and did you see them at the time as a long-term revenue stream?
SPEAKER_02:The honest answer is no, we didn't see them as a long-term revenue stream. It started much like the facility itself because I like doing events. I like competing.
SPEAKER_00:We
SPEAKER_02:went out to some local competitions and I said, hey, we got a facility. I'm a smart guy. We can absolutely do this. We started them over 10 years ago as this is fun and exciting and it might bring in a little bit of extra revenue. A number I wish I had was what we made on the first competition. I don't have that right now. But looking at it over the 10-year evolution and the growth It has become, like we had discussed, a predictable thing that we have on the calendar, and we can usually say, hey, this is going to net us after everything's done, three, five, a great competition, 7K. So it came from just purely liking to compete, going and doing them, and saying, hey, I think we could probably do this, and we could probably do it even a little bit better.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and that's really the key is you start these things, but then you figure out how to make them really great, and then you make them part of that plan. And again, listeners, if you don't have an annual plan, you should DM Chris Cooper and ask for his annual plan. It's a great starting point. Send him a DM right now on Facebook. He will give you an annual plan. That's a great starting point. You can tailor it as you see fit, but there are some essential things on there. John's got an annual plan and we're going to dig into that one. So you're not running stuff randomly. You know where these things are going to go. Like you did the first one. Now it's a great thing. So where do your special events fall and how far in advance do you plan? When does this happen?
SPEAKER_02:So in the fall, we'd like to lay out what we're going to do for the next year, and that's something that we've done for the last couple years working with Two Brain. They've been super helpful with that. But going back to what you had said, Mike, is we started to look at our calendar year of where are the predictable low revenue spots, and rather than trying to just come up with some wild idea, we said, well, what if we started to shift our competition or the nutrition challenge around those predictable low revenue areas so that way we can almost balance off the revenue and we can then see systematically say, okay, in fall we have a competition, and summer we're going to do a nutrition challenge. And it comes a really nice cyclical pattern where you can help offset those slow months with the nutrition challenges and competitions done right, again, planning them. So short answer, we plan them out in the fall for the year prior, and then we just look to basically do one a quarter.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so listeners, if you are sitting here and you do not know what's going on in the next six months, you need an annual plan. It's a huge deal and it can include everything from staff evaluations to special events. You need something though. If you don't have it, you're always going to be reactive. And as Chris Cooper has said, the business will be driving you. You will not be driving your business. John sits down in November, works with his mentor, makes an annual plan for the year. How much better would your business go if you had that plan in place? DM Chris for his plan. Do you find that these things that you've built up, do your members look forward to them? Does it become almost a retention tool where people are like, I want to train for this competition?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. So we've seen it where a common question, I'll get it from other gym owners, is the participant pool. Is it all external or is it internal? What's that split? And it's usually a predictable, probably 50-50. So our members will look at it. And we've had members that have done the competition with us for almost 10 years. And we've created, obviously with that, we've had to create master's divisions. 10
SPEAKER_01:years,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. Right? They've been with us. So yes, we do look at it as a retention tool. And we can all We've also found ways to monetize. Hey, we could do a little skill session, a little competitor's thing before the competition shows up. But we also see that individuals that sign up for the competitions will start to train a little bit more frequently, right? It's very similar to if you were going to sign up for a 5K road race, you'd probably start hitting, running a little bit more. So when you sign up for our competition, you start training a little bit more. And when people train a little bit more, they generally stay with us a little bit longer. So it almost feeds back into, like you said, retention and keeping our members longer.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, one of Chris Cooper's tips is if you have slow summers, put a competition together in fall. And it doesn't have to be an elite level. thing it can just be like I think he called his the catalyst games and it was just a chance to celebrate his members it wasn't designed to be the ultra test of fitness or anything like that but something that no one was going to quit if they register for this thing because they've got a goal they're training for something John mentioned two things that are really important he's got 50% participation inside the gym and then he's got people outside the gym the other 50% that boosts his average revenue per member when someone signs up but it also gets in some new revenue from other people other people maybe they get exposed to John and his business and maybe they want to take part in that so that's a really interesting But again, it all comes down to planning and doing a good job repeatedly over and over again and building momentum. I want to talk specifically about your nutrition challenge because this is very cool. You've got some really interesting features that I think listeners need to know about. How do you run this thing and how do you make it fun for clients?
SPEAKER_02:So the backstory on it, Mike, is that we've been doing nutrition challenges longer than we've been doing competitions. Within the first year or two, so we've been, we're coming up in year 16, been doing them at least two a year, sometimes three a year. And what we'd realize is, as most gym owners realize, like, hey, the bedrock of getting our clients results is we've got to get them eating better. We've got to get them sleeping better. We've got to get them drinking less often, right? So the We call it nutrition healthy habits. We've got to get that dialed in because unfortunately, a thousand burpees a day isn't going to undo two hours of sleep and a six pack a night and just poor nutrition.
SPEAKER_01:I wish it would.
SPEAKER_02:We've been thinking about this for a long time and we've run a lot of nutrition challenges for a long time. But in the last year, what we started to do was gamify it. We started to put a points value to the behaviors that lead to the outcomes that we want. The outcome that we want from a nutrition challenge challenges for our clients, our participants to be healthier, more fit, feel better. And a lot of times that includes losing weight. But we'd always see like 50 people sign up, 80 people sign up, 100 people sign up. And then by like week two, not even week two, like day 10, like Nobody's participating anymore. What's going on? We started to say, what can we do? How do we make this better? The idea of making, I call it, making a healthy competition out of being healthier has gone really well. The shortest way to explain it is you get a point for eating really well. We just call it the go-no-go list. Simple foods. You get a point for hitting your protein. We got away from weighing and measuring because that was very intimidating. For a lot of people, it was too much. We just said, if you follow these guidelines, yes or no, you get a point. Did you move your body for 45 minutes? You get a point. Did you get a good night's sleep? So there's binary, there's yes or no questions you answer and you gain points. And then we also made big, big, big points if you would come in on a Monday and be lighter than you were the Monday prior. So you get these bonus points, these mega bonus points for doing the behavior that most people want when they do a nutrition challenge. And we got bonus points for meal prepping. So what we did was we created a leaderboard So each night you could literally plug in your numbers and you could see in real time, hey, where am I in this challenge against my peers? And what happened is you would now in hindsight, I'm not really surprised by that. People became very competitive when you're running your classes and you say, hey, guys, we're going to go for an 800 meter warm up jog. Everybody tries to win the 800-meter warm-up. Well, guess what happened? People got very, very competitive, but they were competitive in one of the best things ever. Getting more sleep, getting to the gym more often, eating more protein, all the things that made them feel healthier. So we have found that to be very, very effective in our nutrition challenges because it took what was very engaging for the first seven days and then a massive drop-off to the last one we ran internally We had 137 participants. We charged$70, so you can look at the revenue there. And we had, I wanna say, probably 70% go all the way to the end, which historically looking like we'd be lucky if we had like 30, maybe 40% make it to the end. And feedback, we gathered, right? We did a quick Google survey at the end to say, what did you like? How do we make it better? And again, and again, and again, and again, it was the point system, the point system, the scoreboard, the point system. And this is from longstanding members that have done 20 of these with us. Like, John, the point system was so fun. And there's two ways. People said, I'd like the point system for myself because I was trying to beat my points. And then a lot of them also said, I just like the healthy competition. So that has worked really, really well for us to gamify the nutrition challenges. And that's the second one, third one that we've done that way. And it's gone very well.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So basically 40% greater adherence. just because you're putting together a point system and encouraging people to compete. And as you're rattling this stuff off in my head, I'm thinking, okay, I would get a point. I went to bed last night at a good hour. I didn't have any alcohol. I had breakfast and protein. So I'm like adding up points in my head already. You can see, listeners, how this works. And if you have a garment or anything like that, you know, my wife looks at these things and there's badges she wants. This stuff all has an effect on people and it really is motivating. Do you do this, like is this an app or what system do you use here to make this happen?
SPEAKER_02:So we have been using, so it came from internally, hey, wild idea. We run a gym. We're trying to get people healthier and have just built it over time. And it's been archaic, paper and pen. So we use this with our personal training clients. We use this with our nutrition and lifestyle coaching clients. And we say, hey, Mike, here's your sheet. Fill in the sheet and earn your points. So over the last three, four months, we've been building it into an app because now what we can do is we can see the results in real time. So again, if I'm working with you one-on-one, personal training, nutrition, lifestyle coaching, I can just hop on the back end and I can look to see, oh, look, Mike's got 26 points this week. He's got a streak. He's doing amazing. And it simplifies it because it's 2025, giving people a green highlighter and a three-ring binder. It feels like we're stepping back into 1984. So it's a little archaic. Now, it worked, but stepping into current times and leveraging technology, it's going into an app. And the goal was to make it Very accessible and very simple for individuals. Because we tried macros and weighing and measuring. And again, I think if you are an elite level athlete, absolutely. If you want to be on stage being a figure model, absolutely. But if you're John, if you're Mike, and you're like, hey, I just want to be fit. I want to be healthy. I've got 5, 10, 15 pounds I want to lose. Getting rid of the having to weigh and measure and just saying, did you eat these foods? And making it very, very easy to track. And then the point system has been super beneficial. So short story, we are... probably about more than halfway of building out the app.
SPEAKER_01:Ooh, so that's cool because, you know, what happens here, you get this, you get a pack mentality too, where if people see each, you know, you log into the app and someone's got 10,000 steps and you've got 9,980 or something like that, you're probably going for a walk. And so that real-time aspect is really, really cool, that pack mentality. And then the other thing is the streaks you mentioned. So once you start hitting numbers, and again, I'll reference Chris Cooper, he has a streak going of like 750 words a day, I think blogging or something like that. He's going for like an endless amount of time and he has dragged himself out of bed to keep that streak going. Streaks are super powerful. And if you can encourage your members to do it with healthy stuff, how much better is that going to be? And here's the upshot of this. Let's talk business. If your members do this stuff that John's laying out, like eating protein and prepping meals, getting to bed on time, they're going to get better results in the gym. If they get better results in the gym, they're going to stay training with you longer. They're going to pay you more money. Everyone is going to win here. Your coaches make more. Your gym makes more. You make more. The clients are happy. It's a win across the board. And it's just because you're getting them to do the stuff that gets results because your job as a get clients' results. It doesn't matter what program you use. Nothing of that matters. It matters that they get results. You said it again, but remind me, how often do you run a nutrition challenge like this?
SPEAKER_02:competitions we talked about we try to basically alternate right we've got a competition then we do a nutrition challenge competition so we're not you know beating the same drum every single time there's a there's a nice predictable rhythm to it and what we have found and actually going to talk about the app as well too is doing this for a long time as many individuals do so so so well during the actual challenge they're they're focused they're going they're going they're going and then it ends and they're like now what all right so the nice thing about the app is that the app is just going it's So yes, you can have that focus and tension and you can be hammering, hammering, hammering and say, okay, the challenge ended. But I'm still going to keep going. I want to keep my streak going. I want to keep this going. And they don't have to stop and be like, all right, I have to wait six more months until the spring challenge starts. So we run two, we call them 28-day challenges a year. And then actually we're doing one right now is I'll throw them out there just kind of off the cuff. They're free. I don't charge for the short ones. Then we call them sprints and they're 10 days. And I'm in one, right? Going back to exactly what you said. I'm in it right now with the members and there's like six of us tied for first and I I'm going to make sure that I have to get my workout in. I'm going to make sure that I'm getting my seven hours of sleep tonight. So I will adjust and move things around in my personal schedule to make sure that I don't get knocked out of the top spot because I want to compete with these guys. And like I said, the best part about it is it's a healthy competition. Like, oh, I got extra sleep. Like, I'm competing to be healthier.
SPEAKER_01:Do you find that you get some carryover into ongoing programs as a result of this, we'll call it a kickstart or something like that with a challenge?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, we actually have just started using this with our new members right when they joined, because going back to what you said, talking business, the best time to get somebody results is as fast as humanly possible when they come through the door. So to say, hey, Mike, awesome, welcome to our facility. We've still got to give you the arcade paper right now because the app's not done. But this is our system, this is our protocol, and if you can score 200 points in the next 30 days, you're going to be on fire, my
SPEAKER_01:friend.
SPEAKER_02:We're using it right, literally, from the second they say, cool, I want to get going, the NoSwa intro ends, we say, awesome, hey, let's chat about how we're going to get you to where you want to be as fast as humanly possible. And then it also gives us shared language, right? Because then we can talk about points, right? I can say, hey, Mike, you're 10 days in. How are we doing with the points? Do we have, at this point, you should have around 70 points. Are you understanding the points? So we use our general manager, and she's reaching out to our new clients and saying, hey, Mike, she's doing exactly that. Hey, Mike, how are we doing with the points? Any questions on the points? And it gives them a quantifiable way to see that they're making progress. Are they getting into classes? Are they eating right? Because again, going back to it, we want to help that person do what they said they wanted to do. And if we just go the traditional route of like, yeah, eat better and get into class, they might. We're like, no, here, do these things specifically. And it's also the holistic picture of like sleep is on there. Alcohol intake is on there. Hydration is on there. What time did you stop eating before bed? All of these things that play a part into getting the client what they want, which is the most common thing we hear is, I want more energy. I want to drop 10, 20, 30 pounds. I want to feel better. I want to look better. Well, you could crush your nutrition. You could maybe use a different app and crush your nutrition. But if you don't sleep well and you're drinking too often, you're going to have a really hard time doing that. And then again, pull it all together and put a score to it has worked really well.
SPEAKER_01:Listeners could do this with just an Excel spreadsheet if they so desired.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. That's literally where this came from. We said, what are the things that will make somebody healthy? Okay, how do we just... It's paper and pen. It's nothing. I wish I could say, oh, we... We came up with the idea and put the scoring together, but you could absolutely just come up with this, put it into a spreadsheet, a Google Doc, print it off, and give it to the clients. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I like the simplicity of the whole thing because I've done the same thing with the weighing and measuring and food and eating and so forth. Some people just hate that stuff. Or if they sign up for it, they realize right away it's not for them. It becomes complicated. But tick seven boxes, score six points or whatever it is, that sounds very easy, very manageable on both the client side and the coach side you can use this very quickly to make something really really kind of sexy in your gym where people are like i want to try this i want to track i want to be competitive i want to get that momentum so listeners that is a very interesting thing that you guys can pick up if you're going to do something like this but again it comes down to that annual plan so talk to me again john about how does mentorship fit into this and the annual planning cycle with you
SPEAKER_02:So my mentor is David, and he's been over the moon phenomenal because I have a lot of ideas, trying lots of new stuff. Every time we chat, he's like, okay, here's the next three new ideas. And he does a very good job of just listening at first and saying, that's a good idea. John, that's a bad idea. John, that's a bad idea, but maybe if we polish it this way and we try something different. Or the nice thing is, I've mentioned before that I like to mentor because Where I live, I don't have a lot of business owners that I can talk to about business. And there's definitely not any that I can talk to about business that is gym and health related specific. So by having that mentor that I can bounce the ideas off of and have them say, oh yeah, we've done something like that before. Hey, this is how we've done our challenges. I can listen, listen to some other experience in the same industry. and really get some fine tuning, right? Obviously, we start the calls off with, hey, how's the head count going? What's arm look like? What's leg look like? Metrics, yeah. The bedrock, right? Because these challenges alone aren't going to pay your bills, right? A competition alone isn't going to pay your bills. But they can be nice little auxiliary things that can create some extra revenue. So we chat about, hey, is the foundation strong? Okay, cool. What are we doing for these little projects? And he's just had... Really good sage wisdom. Sometimes probably tell me not to do something that probably would have been a mistake that would have cost lots of money.
SPEAKER_01:On the other end of it, though, I'm sure he told you, OK, we look at the numbers for this nutrition challenge, this competition. Let's keep doing that. And we're going to put that in your annual plan. We're going to screw it in deep because that thing's not coming out because it's working great. And that's something as a mentor will tell you that, too. Don't chase that shiny thing. Keep doing what you're doing because it is working really, really well. This is the other thing you get out of this plan is the accountability of someone saying, hey, did you do your annual plan? Because left to your own devices, you might be like, I will get to it. And then all of a sudden, Jan one rolls around, you've got nothing. And that's when you start saying, Oh my God, February sucks. I need to put together a crappy challenge. I don't know how to do that. And it's a really rough way to run a business. You're not steering the boat. The boat is just going in circles with the motor running. It's not a good thing for anything. As we close this out. So Jim is looking to do something with either a special event or a challenge. They want to generate more revenue. So like you, you said, you know, let's say they're out there. They could tack on, let's say with a couple of events, 10, 20, 30,$40,000 to their gross. These are not insignificant numbers. What are your tips? If someone's thinking about doing something like this?
SPEAKER_02:First one would be obviously start small with it. It doesn't have to be, our first competition, I think we had 80 athletes, right? Set a goal. Hey, I want to have 50, 60 athletes. Start small and then build from there. And the second thing is look at your existing ecosystem of other businesses around you that you can work with. So a prime example of that is we have a restaurant. It's my brother-in-law that owns a healthy restaurant locally. So we talk about, hey, when we run this big nutrition challenge, I want you to sponsor it and I'm going to talk about you left and right. We can do the prizes can be to you. So it's mutual beneficial and then what we're learning is like if we can get enough sponsorship that covers almost any expense that we had so the revenue collected from the actual registration the your profit on the project goes higher so who do you have in your ecosystem maybe their existing members maybe they're not maybe it's just a local supplement store chiropractor massage therapist who has the same members that you do that you could offer them something that would be beneficial, maybe it's the exposure, maybe it's word of mouth, that they would want to engage as a sponsor or be somehow involved with your competition or your nutrition challenge, or both, because we've done that with both, where we've said, hey, our last competition we did very, very well because we had so many different sponsors that wanted to be part of it. Now, you also have to take into consideration we've done this for 10 plus years, so we've built it up over time. So year one, you want to say, hey, let me go... ask for$5,000 sponsors for my competition with 30 people in it. That might be a stretch. Maybe. But you could talk to a massage therapist and say, hey, you know, would you want to sponsor for$500? And, you know, we can get you some signage. And I think start small, but always leverage and build the relationships that you have. Again, especially when you have overlapping clientele, that's been something that has been helpful for us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the best, the analogy of best day to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best day is today, right? So like start doing some stuff and I'll talk on what John said, put an annual plan together, right? Don't think about this stuff for like next month. Put this in a document that lives and breathes and evolves and put this stuff in there and then plan to do it and do a great job and crush it. The second thing I'll give you, John mentioned, I'm going to reiterate it. Profit. These things should not exist just to like, be there they should generate profit and i made a mistake i started with competitions and i spent all the money on prizes and new equipment i made no money or i even lost money if you figure in the time run these things that a profit and a mentor can show you exactly how to set them up to with a profit margin make sure you're not overworking your coaches and destroying your business that these things are actually kicking in money and if you do it right your arm goes up your revenue goes up your retention goes up john said all that stuff happened and again he was on our leaderboard which ran from 61 000 to 114 000 a month these are our incredible recurring revenue numbers for gyms. John, I want to thank you for sharing, opening up the books and sharing your secrets with us, especially the gamification of nutrition stuff. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:My pleasure, Mike. Absolute thrill to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Listeners, if you want to find out more about how you might move in the direction of our revenue leaders, you should book a call with a mentor. Through the link in the show notes. That was John Bartholomew. I'm Mike Workinen. He was one of our top revenue generators and our last leaderboard. This is Run a Profitable Gym. Please hit subscribe on your way out the door. And now here's TrueBrain founder Chris Cooper with a final message.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, it's Two Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I'd love to have you in that group. It's Gym Owners United on Facebook or go to GymOwnersUnited.com to join. Do it today.
