Reclaim Your Time: The Exact System to Move From Coach to Owner

Stop wearing every hat in your gym. It’s time to move from coach to owner.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper shares the exact steps gym owners can take to reclaim their time, take regular vacations and build businesses that run on systems.

He walks you through the process of “climbing the value ladder,” aka buying back your time:

- Identify the roles you fill.
- Calculate the replacement cost for each role.
- Write step-by-step instructions for each role.
- Delegate roles from lowest to highest value.
- Take time off to test the system.
- Identify problems and upgrade instructions so they're perfect.

Coop also explains how to coach and evaluate staff and why gym owners often mistake poor systems for “people problems.”

Tune in for the full playbook, then apply it and put it to the test by finally taking some time off.

Links

Gym Owners United

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0:48 - The steps to take time off

2:57 - How Coop climbed the value ladder

4:26 - Get the systems out of your head

8:45 - Activate your staff

11:52 - Is it a people or process problem?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

How much time you taking off this year? This is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm Chris Cooper, the founder of Two Brain Business, and today I'm going to tell you how to take time off, why you should, and how to force yourself. I was asked this question, so Uncle Chris, how much vacation time you get this year? I had a family barbecue last weekend, and my relationship with taking time off can only be described as, well, it's complicated, and every entrepreneur can relate. In theory, you have unlimited time off, right? You're the boss, and everybody thinks you can just take a day off whenever you feel like But in practice, you're the boss and you have the worst boss in the world, so you probably don't take any vacations or time off. As the owner of our gyms, nobody gives us time off, nobody gives us permission, and nobody enforces a two-week or three-week break when we're burned out. So here's how we coach gym owners to take time off and kind of force them at Two Brain. So first, we break down all of the roles in your business. Think of these as the hats that you wear, like cleaner or or billing or group coach or personal trainer or sales or marketing. These are all separate hats that you put on and take off when you switch roles. Now, I want you to write these roles, list them out on a blank sheet of paper. I've got a graphic here on the video if you're watching on YouTube. Now, beside each one of these roles, write your replacement value, how much you'd have to pay somebody else to take that job off your hands. So, for example, a cleaner should make around minimum wage, so you write$20 next to the cleaner role on your sheet. And if you're not sure, you can just check using a service like Glassdoor. Somebody who does the billing or the social media should be paid slightly higher, like$25 an hour. Now what you want to do, once you've got a dollars figure next to each roll on your list, is rank those rolls from high to low replacement value. And then you're gonna put the top at the sheet, the lowest cost replacement value first. So the cleaner role, for example, might be the top of your list, followed by admin or social media after that. The first thing that you wanna do is replace yourself in the least expensive role. So for example, you hire a cleaner, and while they're cleaning, you use that time to do marketing or you reinvest it in a higher value role that's on your list. So if you're paying somebody$20 an hour to clean, while you earn$70 for a personal training appointment, That's a huge win. You might have heard people refer to this as buying back your time. This is what it means. We call it the value ladder because you're constantly climbing a ladder of value and making your time worth more and more and more. You have to take it one rung at a time and sometimes that takes time. And then in a few months, you replace yourself in the second least expensive role and so on. And this means that your time is getting more valuable, but you're still working just as much. You're just substituting higher value tasks for lower value tasks. That's all. So the next step is how you take time off. I want to pause here and tell you a story so that you can see how this works. When I was working with my first mentor, Dennis Turcotte, he said, Chris, you need to hire a cleaner. I said, I can't even afford to pay myself. How am I going to pay a cleaner? And he said, here's what you're going to do? You're going to hire the cleaner. The cleaner will come in at night, nine o'clock when you're usually the one mopping the floor. And while they are mopping, you are going to send an email to your list. advertising or offering a prepaid session of personal training appointments. And I said, okay, we'll try it. So I hired this guy named Sean on a three month contract. And this was, it felt like a big financial risk, even though back then minimum wage was maybe about$12.50 an hour in Canada. So I'm paying Sean$12.50 an hour and he's over there mopping. And I'm sitting here at my computer and I'm writing this email and I'm like, I don't know what to write. And finally, at the end of the hour, I'm like, hey, if you're interested, we now sell 10 and 20 packs of personal training. send. Now keep in mind, this is like 2009. I didn't know that you should be selling personal training on memberships and I didn't offer a discount, thank goodness, but I sent it out to my entire client list. By morning, somebody had agreed and said, I'll pay next time I'm in. I made$500 in that hour and paid Sean 12. That's how you climb the value ladder. You trade low value roles for higher value roles. You stop doing the things that don't produce revenue for your gym and you start doing the things that do. That's what climbing the value ladder But you've heard Dan Martell refer to this as buying back your time, for example. Now, every time you delegate one of these roles, you have to clearly map out a set of instructions for your replacement. These should be so simple that a 12-year-old could follow them and so complete that there are no gaps. When you hire a cleaner, you give them a cleaning checklist to follow every single day. When you hire somebody to do the billing, you give them step-by-step instructions so simple that a 12-year-old could follow them, complete with pictures and video. Here's a screenshot of what my billing software looks like. Here's a video of me pulling that revenue metric out of Wattify or whatever it is. This means that you're not gonna skip steps. Every time you make one of these instructions, you create a system and your business is the sum of your systems. I'm gonna say that again. Your business is the sum of the systems that you create and get out of your head. It is not the sum of your knowledge. It's not the sum of your creativity. Your business rises on your marketing, but it falls to the level of your systems. Here's an example of making it 12-year-old simple. After working with Sean, the cleaner for a couple of months, I was really getting into things. And, you know, one day when he was in there cleaning, I said, okay, I've got an hour. I've done my marketing. I'm going to wait around for Sean. I'm going to run out and grab my groceries. You know, it's nine 30 at night. So I run down the street. I grab my groceries. I come back. It's 10 o'clock. He's sitting on a chair in the lobby, looking like this, looking sad, hand on the mop, mop in the bucket. Sean, what's wrong? Well, we're out of soap. Okay. I forgot to put that in the checklist. Here's what to do if we're out of soap. And so I added that to the checklist. It got better, et cetera. But if I hadn't gone away, I wouldn't have been there to solve Sean's problem. The problem wouldn't have arisen. I wouldn't have identified it and I wouldn't have fixed the system. That's key. The key is that you need to go away. You need to let the systems run, see where they break and then come back and fix them. Okay. That's an important lesson. I'm going to be coming back to that in a moment. The first time you write a system, you might feel like, oh, it's perfect, but you don't know that it's actually actually good. until you test it. And the way that you test a system in your business is that you take time off. So we tell gym owners in Two Brain to take four days off after they've systemized their business and built a playbook. And that means they can't text their business. They can't email with their gym. They do give their cell number to one person for emergencies only. And then they take four days off. And after four days, they return to the gym and they check up on things. And they find the gaps in the system. Like, whoops, I forgot to tell the cleaner how to get more soap. And then they fix those gaps for next time. They update their systems and they improve their business. And eventually there are no gaps left. But the first time you systemize anything in your business, it's not going to be perfect. The only way that you make it perfect is by taking time away and testing it and then fixing it when you get back. Now, after a couple of months working with Two Brain, we tell every gym owner to take a week off. And eventually they schedule a week off every quarter to recharge and fall in love with their gym again. A lot of people get burned out because they're just with their gym every single day, every single second, and they're thinking about it all the time. You need some time away. You need some distance. Now, if you're the boss, that means you don't have a boss. So there's nobody giving you permission or forcing you to take time off. And you know that you should, but there's always something that seems urgent, right? So you take your laptop on vacation with you, or you're constantly checking your phone over the dinner with friends. And if you view the time away as a test though, you're way more likely to do it. At least that's my secret. I also like to tell my team that I'm taking a think week because that's what Steve Jobs used to do. But I'm actually during that week riding my bike. I'm reading and I'm thinking. I'm just not checking Slack and I'm not taking meetings and I'm not answering emails. That to me is a vacation, even though I am kind of thinking about work. So when my nephew asked me this question this year, I said, oh, I'm taking a week off at the start of every month. And I was happy to say it. Three years ago, I would have made a joke like, ah, my boss is a jerk. I never get time. So in case you need me to say it, you need time away from your gym. You have to rekindle the passion that you have with your gym, and that means a break from each other. Your gym also needs time away from you. Here's your permission. I'm giving you permission. go away. Treat it as a test. Now, I want to talk about how to activate your staff. So you've got your gym to a point where you've got systems and it's running on systems. It can run consistently without you. That doesn't mean that it's going to grow without you. It can just like maintain for a little while. And when you open the gym, somebody might have told you that just be a good coach and the rest will take care of itself, right? Well, bad news. The rest is your business. That's 90% of your job now as a gym owner. Being a good coach is necessary, but insufficient to run a good business. And Possibly the worst part? None of us realized that we would have to manage other people, but we do. So here's how to do it successfully. If you really want to grow your gym, you have to manage people to complete the systems that you've put in place so that you can focus on growth. So the first step is to tell them exactly what you want them to do. So earlier I said that you have to write your systems so that a 12-year-old could understand them. Not because your staff is uneducated or dumb, but because this will force you to think through the gaps in understanding. If you don't tell somebody how to mix the soap in the mop bucket or where to get more soap, they will do it differently than you will. They might do it wrong. And if you don't tell them exactly what time to start class, they might start it late or start it early. So write your systems, which we sometimes call SOPs, as if you're writing them for your pre-teen nephew. Don't skip any steps because nobody can read your mind. Nobody can think their way through the gaps. It's not a matter of common sense. That doesn't exist. You have to write these out plainly. Step two is to Coach your staff through your system at least once. You know how you coach your clients through your workouts? You have to coach your staff through their jobs. And they might need more coaching in the beginning, and they still need regular evaluations and form correction over time. This isn't hand-holding. It's coaching, and it's your job. The third step is to have them schedule the time to do the job. Now, this is easy for simple jobs like cleaning, like show up at 9, heat up the water, etc. But it's less easy for jobs like lead nurture, where staff can be kind of on and kind of off 24 hours a day. So I teach my staff to make appointments with themselves to do the work. My higher level staff, like my general manager, has a golden hour practice, just like I do, where he starts his day doing one thing to grow the gym every single day. We determine his list for the golden hour at the start of every month. He executes every day. And I know there's somebody out there working to actually grow my gym every single day, instead of just scrolling Instagram, putting in time and punching the clock. The fourth step is to evaluate them quarterly. Everything degrades over time. A quarterly career roadmap meeting can realign each staff person on what they want, how to get it, and how they're doing so far. These are coaching meetings. Just as you do goal reviews for your clients, you need to do career roadmap meetings for your coaches. Now, you can read all the leadership books about eating the frogs and doing the hard things and starting with why and turning the battleship around and making your bet, but repeating these basics over and over will get you 90% of the way to a well-run gym with minimal frustration. Anytime I meet a gym owner who blames those millennials or their uninvested staff or their unmotivated staff, and they want to add some kind of incentive program to get them to do their basic job, I ask if they're doing these four things. And 90% of the time, the gym owner has a process problem that will be solved with these four steps. The other 10% of the time, they actually do have a people problem, but they'll never know when until they fix their processes. Bad processes break good employees. I'll say that again. Bad processes break good employees. Good employees do not fix bad process problems. There are no unicorns out there that you're going to hire and they'll come in and fix your business for you. If you don't systemize your business properly, you will not only fire quickly and hire quickly, but you'll burn out the good people really quickly and eventually be left with no staff. Now, at the start of this podcast, I said that being a good coach is necessary, but insufficient to run a good business. You probably didn't want to hear that. I sure didn't. You know, back in 2008, when I finally realized it, we all wish that just being the best at our job would make us financially stable. And that can be true. But when you open a gym, your job is no longer coach. Now it's owner. If you want to be financially stable, You have to be good at the owner job. Want proof? Well, there are close to 9,000 micro gyms that close by going out of business every single year. Most of those are owned by good coaches. Some of them are owned by great coaches, better coaches than you and better coaches than me. All of those people opened a gym out of passion. They prayed on it. They asked for help. They took loans from their mom. They listened to every podcast. They read every book that you did. They are not dumber than you are. And they are not lazier than I am. They simply believe the story that being a good coach would somehow make their business successful. My mission is to save you from that lie, whether it's being told to you by your certification body, by your affiliate provider, or by yourself. You have to understand that you need to be good at business to have a good business. And part of being a good gym owner means managing people effectively. That means systemizing things It means coaching people on how to do them. It means evaluating them regularly and never assuming that people are the problem first. Always fix the process first. Hope this podcast helps. I hope you're out there helping people and you're continuing to do that for the next 20 years. My gym turns 20 in September. It took me three years to learn the lessons that I have shared today. It cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn them and fix the problems. I'm giving them to you for free because I don't want you to go through the same pain that I did. If you want to chat more about this or talk to me in person, go to gymownersunited.com. That's our free group for gym owners that I wish had existed 20 years ago when I founded my gym.