Systemize, Optimize, Automate: The Gym Owner's AI Playbook

Tired of wearing every hat in your gym?

AI can handle repetitive tasks so you can focus on the work only you can do.

Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper explains how gym owners can use artificial intelligence to automate their businesses without losing the human touch that gyms need.

He walks through the three-step process of systemize, optimize, automate—explaining that many gym owners fail to use AI successfully because they’re trying to automate broken or undefined processes.

Once solid systems have been optimized, gym owners can use AI for basic customer service, habits coaching, inventory management and similar tasks, which frees up their time for high-value work.

Coop also shares specific tools Two-Brain gyms are already using, from Garmin Clipboard for tracking athlete data to ManyChat for nurturing leads.

Check out the full episode to learn which tasks to automate first in your gym so you can start buying back your time. 

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3:02 - AI for ops and systems

8:05 - AI for inventory management

15:21 - AI for habit-based coaching

18:37 - AI for marketing & brand

25:38 - Massive opportunity for gym owners

29:39 - Culture, community & identity

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Running a micro-gym means wearing too many hats. You're the cleaner, and then you're the bookkeeper, and then you're the marketer, and then you're the sales rep, and that's before anybody even shows up to train or be coached. And if you don't want to do all those yourself, you can hire staff. But hiring staff turns you into a manager, and none of us signed up to manage people, so the solution to getting the work done becomes this new, bigger problem and more work and managerial work that we hate. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and today I'm going to talk about AI, where we are with artificial intelligence and bots and agents, and how a gym owner could potentially run a single-person operation up to a million dollars a year. Now, a lot of you gym owners like me are seeing ads for AI solutions to solve these problems. Like, oh, if I just had a robot instead of a human for chat and sales and marketing and social media, this would be a lot easier, right? Well, long-time gym owners might remember hearing the same thing about virtual assistants a few years ago. Hey, if I had a virtual assistant in India, I could pay them way less and get the work done faster. But as we all learned... VAs can work, but they're never a simple set it and forget it, buy your way out of the problem solution. You still have to follow the three steps to business excellence. These are systemize, then optimize, and then automate. And the same is true if you're using AI or bots or chat agents. You have to first systemize what you want in your business and then optimize it by doing it yourself usually, and then automate it by delegating to a staff person or automating it with a bot. So first you have to standardize everything so that you're running a real business that doesn't require your constant presence. This is how you make your business good. Then you have to test various upgrades to see what works best, put people better than you in that role. And this is what makes a business great. And only then can you hand off delivery to a staff person or sometimes a robot or We'll be right back. on repeat. But most gym owners screw this up by hiring a robot to do some undefined or untested or broken task. Robots are not good at that. VAs weren't great at that either. To build a good gym, you have to start with the foundation, not the marketing. You can't just hire a robot to do something that you hate or you're bad at. So here's how you can use AI to improve first the bottom level of your business pyramid and then the next level and the next level and then finally And finally, the top level, which is marketing. Let's start with the basics, your operations and your systems. Your marketing changes over time, your clients change, your staff changes, you grow as a leader, but your operations and your systems are what your business run on. That's the foundation of your gym. So here are some examples that you can use for your ops and systems. First, workout programming. There's a great tool by Garmin, the people that make the watch that you're probably wearing right now, called Clipboard. This is an app. It's underutilized and underappreciated. The app is for coaches. It pulls in all the data from every athlete's wearable in your gym. And as the largest producer of fitness wearables in the world, by far, coaches can get more data from their athletes in one place than from any other app. It's crazy to me that Garmin Clipboard is absolutely free, and it even includes an Thank you. Another great systems and operations level tool is Gusto. Gusto has AI features to help you manage payroll, pay your contractors, and even calculate benefits with automated reminders and tax filing and error detection, which is especially valuable if you don't have a bookkeeper. Another great tool is QuickBooks Smart Invoicing. So QuickBooks now has AI features that auto categorize expenses, send smart payment reminders, and flag inconsistencies, which can help gym owners track cash flow. without hiring full-time help. Now look, I'm giving you AI apps, bots, suggestions here. This is not a paid ad. We don't let anybody sponsor this. These are simply tools that gyms in the Two Brain community are using right now and love. And I thought I'd share them with you. There's no paid endorsement here. There's nothing in it for me to recommend these over anything else. But these are just tools that gyms in Two Brain are using, which is exactly why Two Brain is the most progressive gym mentorship company on the planet. If we're not sure what the solution would be, we turn to our gyms and say, how can you prove that this is better? And when a solution comes along, we either buy it or build it for gym owners. And that means we're always evolving and always making the program better and better and better. A third app that you can use for your basic operations is sell by chat or FAQ support. So if somebody wants to put their membership on hold or ask about a policy or your schedule or your hours or, you know, how can I book a goal review or how do I get PT? You can use something like ManyChat on your site because that allows you to build Facebook and Instagram DM flows that simulate real conversations. With a chat GPT plugin, it can answer nuanced questions, book no sweat intros for you, and qualify leads 24-7. Now, some platforms like GLM have bots like this that will handle chat. I just want to take a moment and differentiate a bot from an agent. A bot follows a script that's predefined and agent learns as it goes. And so, you know, in right now, most companies that use bots on their sites or on the sites that they build for you for lead nurture are actually bots and they're following a predefined script. In the future, as AI gets better and better, these might actually become agents who can have more meaningful conversations with people, potentially even do no sweat intros themselves. In a very similar vein, if you're struggling with lead nurture, and by the way, you We talk about this a lot on this podcast. Most gyms are not struggling to get leads. They're struggling to nurture the leads that they get or get those leads to come in and book a no sweat intro and close them. GLM, Gym Lead Machine, automates SMS and email workflows, and they use AI to decide when and how to follow up with leads, improving your show rate and lead conversion. GLM's AI tools write nurture emails, segment leads by behavior, and optimize sequences based on open rates, which is perfect for gym owners who don't don't have time to chase cold leads. Now, this is a great example of systemize, optimize, automate. So what we teach gym owners to do in Two Brain is how to do sell by chat, how to have a conversation and nurture your leads to come in for a no sweat intro. And we systemize that by giving gym owners a script and a pattern to follow. Over time, Working with a mentor, the gym owner optimizes that. They get better at it themselves until they're so good at it that they can teach one of their staff to do it. And at that point, they can choose, do I automate this by giving it to a staff person or do I automate this task by giving it to a bot? And now, of course, the process of optimization never really goes away, whether you delegate or automate. And so the gym owner's real responsibility here is to make sure that your lead nurture metrics are at a certain measurement, and if they're not, then they can constantly be improving them. But they're not reinventing the system from scratch. They're not answering every text themselves forever. They're starting by systemizing the process, doing it themselves until it's optimal, and then automating it by delegating it to staff or using a bot. Another way to use AI in your business is inventory management and supplies. Look, I hate it when we run out of paper towels. I hate it when we've got a supplement and it's out of stock because Because it's just like something that I forgot and that's created this unnecessary delay. So you could use Notion AI for inventory logs. You can create a custom inventory database with Notion AI to create and track cleaning supplies, supplements, apparel, and then set automated reorder triggers using integrations. I mean, I'll tell you how I use this for apparel. I have it just remind me every quarter like, hey, call Matt at Forever Fierce and talk to him about a new apparel pre-order. I don't inventory apparel more than like like half a dozen t-shirts, but every quarter or every four months, we have a new inventory pre-order that makes us$1,300 to$1,800 profit. You can also use Zapier and GPT automations to connect spreadsheets or point of sale systems to chat GPT to automatically send reminders or place supply orders when stock gets low. So what you can do is just set this up with your inventory system to send you a text or an email or a message or an alert saying like, hey, you're almost on a paper tell us time to order more. And you know, let's face it, if you're really sophisticated about this, the new open AI agent, you know, scenario will actually order the stuff from Amazon for you. One of my clients provides all my cleaning supplies, they have that kind of business. And so you know, I have this set up to have them like just check when they're in the gym once a month, what do I need place the order and send me a bill. That's how I automate that. But most gyms aren't that lucky. And so you can do this with software and bots. And Look, if all this stuff is overwhelming and you're like, ah, technology, I get it, right? Like I'm 50 years old. This stuff is new to me. And every time I think, wow, in two years, we'll be able to do this. I quickly discover it's possible right now. The reason I'm sharing this with you right now is I want to tell you, or at least paint this picture that it is possible to have a gym run solely by you, that you can automate with AI, all of these basic principles. principles, all these basic systems that run your gym. I'm going to be talking more about sales and marketing in a moment, but I want you to know like it is possible that you can scale now without staff or you can scale better with a couple of key staff that you have because AI is not a replacement for all staff. It's an augmentation. It can make you better at the marketing, for example. It can make your coaches better at the programming. And so what you do is you take like one or two really core amazing people And you help them almost like duplicate themselves by using AI and bots instead of hiring six or seven people in which you've still got the one or two core people, but four or five of them are just kind of like mediocre C plus. you can still do this. And like, you know, for example, I'm going to talk in a moment too about where bots might actually fit into coaching or where they might replace roles like a CSM in your gym too, which will free up your best staff to do more coaching or more of what they're really good at. So delivery of your core service should be done by a human. Let's face it. You can't put a Tesla robot in front of the noon group and expect them to get really, really excited or build relationships. AI tools are robots and They can take over low value roles. They can reduce your payroll and they can give you more time to grow your business. They can make you the owner better at the marketing and sales, your primary responsibility. And this can give you more time too, but only if you take the time to systemize your business first, because AI isn't about replacing great people. It's about replacing repetitive, low leverage tasks so that you and your team can focus on what actually grows your business. What does that leave you? Well, it leaves you with the high value stuff. And usually that's the stuff you love doing, like coaching. So for example, I wouldn't let ChatGPT write this blog post or podcast script for me because it's super important and I love writing you love letters every single day. So now I just want to give you two insights on what we're testing at my own gym using chat agents. So the first is a virtual CSM. Now a client support manager is to retention what a salesperson is to closing clients. So once they're in the gym, somebody has to actually be in charge of keeping them there. So the CSM's job is to look at a weekly report and say, who hasn't shown up this week? It's to follow up with people a lot, especially when they're brand new. It might be like lead nurture a little bit to get people to come into the NSI, but that depends on your CSM. They also do things like organize events and parties and remember people's birthdays and send them a card and they organize the Christmas card and our big charity gift giving experience. Christmas is organized by the CSM. This is a place where a bot can step in and do a lot. So for example, Let's say that somebody has a question about their membership. Can I put this on hold for two weeks? Or they're really struggling to make a class time and they want to see a schedule. Or maybe they haven't shown up in a week. Well, a bot can be programmed to do all of that stuff for you. You can place an agent on your site to answer questions, to answer questions about the workout. Hey, what time are the classes today? Basic stuff like that. But you can also set it up on the back end using something like ManyChat or Some software platforms even have this capability now to send a message to people when they haven't been to class for four days. Where are you? We miss you, that kind of thing. You can set it up to automatically order birthday cards for people or welcome gifts when they join up at your gym. You can do all this stuff right now, and a lot of it is the work that a CSM was required to do. Of course, you want to have a human behind it all. Right now, most of your clients don't know when they're talking to a bot. That's going to change very soon. People are becoming very wary of this. That doesn't mean that a bot can't start the process. So for example, let's say that you have a bot working through GLM and it's sending people texts and it's like, hey, you know, you've got an appointment tomorrow. Are you good to go? And the person is like, no, I need to change. Can we reschedule? The bot can handle that. It can have access to your schedule and it can make the change. But if the person is like, no, I'm scared. I'm really nervous about this. Is this fake? That's where a human can step in at any time. The cool thing about Jim lead machine is like, you can see that that conversation happens. happening and step in and the bot will just back off at any point. And so you always want to have that human backup. But the reality is if a bot is handling 80% of the conversations that are happening around your gym about the basic things, processes, pricing, scheduling, how do I put things on hold? What's the workout today? that frees up 80% of your time to have the more meaningful and important conversations. And if you find that you're having the same conversations over and over, you can automate those with the bot too. So CSM is a great role for like an AI agent or bot. And another one is habits coaching. This is one that I've been testing. So more and more to Two Brain Gyms, we've been saying like running a nutrition coaching one-on-one program is complicated. About 80% of the people that need help with nutrition would probably be best helped by just teaching them good habits and repeating those over and over and over again. Hiring a nutrition coach is time sensitive. Like it takes you a couple of months to get them certified. It's expensive. Like you have to invest in that certification. You might have to invest in new software. Sometimes you have to upgrade your insurance. Maybe you have to pay a licensing body to oversee your nutritionist or dietician, whatever. And unfortunately, they do get paid a lot. So your margin on the nutrition coaching one-on-one is very low. And they have to be managed. And let's face it, like the average leg of a nutrition client, according to the state of the industry, was like three months. So what if you just sold a habits challenge once a month? And we started doing this at my gym way back in January. The profit on this was around$1,300 the first time we did it. When we did it again the next month, over half the people signed up and more people. So the profit was over$1,800. And it's really, really easy. It doesn't take much of the coach's time. The most important thing though is that that the clients actually stuck to basic habits for a full month. Like it was a success for the client. That's most important to me. It was a success for the coach. That's second most important to me. They made a great income off this and it really helped the business. And it was easy, which is like my new fourth criteria. Well, here's what's interesting though. The job of the coach in that challenge wasn't complicated. They posted a prompt in a private Facebook group every day and they responded when people texted them. What should I have for dinner? You know, hey, I'm in the grocery store. Should I buy chicken or fish? You can do all of that with an app. And the reality here is that like sometimes it's even better than the coach. So let's say that somebody coaches or texts a coach and it's like 10 at night and they're like, oh, I'm sitting here on the couch. I'm starving. There's nothing in my fridge but ice cream. What do I do? Well, what's the coach going to do? Oh, I guess I've got to get out of bed and respond to this. Or they're just going to leave it for the morning because they're already asleep. A bot's not going to have that problem. And a bot can be programmed to ask the client, like, why are you hungry? Okay, let's plan out tomorrow's food in advance now. Go drink a glass of water while we're doing it. See if you're still hungry later, et cetera. You know, a bot can go deep and it can talk to the client for three hours if the client wants to. And that's, you know, one place where you can quickly automate a very simple challenge in your business that will serve 80% of your clients. And if the client needs or wants one-on-one support, then you can escalate to a human, but you're still running this automatically the whole time. So those are two places where you can use your bot like in ops. They're not going to replace you in coaching a group class, but they could replace you in programming. They could replace you in coach evaluation. They could replace you with like a habits coach bot, for example, and even as a CSM. And that's like four big roles in your business that are either costing you a ton of time or you a ton of money to staff. And now I want to talk about how to use AI in your gym's marketing and brand and culture. So in the first part of this podcast, I talked about how to use AI bots for your operations and even for some of your coaching. But the top of the business pyramid is built on attention and storytelling and human connection. Great marketing and brand storytelling take time, and that's time that a lot of gym owners don't have. I mean, I've been telling gym owners to publish more content since 2011, at least. And it's still the most challenging part of what we recommend gym owners do. So now it's an interesting time because content is still really powerful to your prospective audience and to your clients, but AI is making that really easy and fast to produce content for the first time. We're at this kind of nexus where you can create content in seconds and that content is still going to be really effective for getting and keeping clients. So here's how AI can help you build and promote your gym better and faster and with more consistency across all four marketing funnels. So the first funnel is social media and GLM, Gym Lead Machine, uses AI to plan, generate, and optimize your social posts, automatically repurposing content into multiple four to keep your feed consistent and strategic. Another tool is CapCut. It's AI automatically captions formats and cuts your videos for reels and TikToks, making it easy to create high quality video content in minutes. A little word of warning here. Some platforms and their promoters overemphasize using AI to create content. AI is not perfect. You still have to look at the pictures and edit the text. I'm sure you've seen a Facebook post from somebody that's like all in on AI and it's got spelling errors or the picture is off, it doesn't make sense, you immediately lose trust, not just for the AI, but for that person too. Remember, like your brand is your reputation. And if you don't spell check, if you don't check what you're putting out in the world, your reputation could grow or it could suffer. I just want you to remember that a bad piece of content can hurt you as much as 50 good pieces of content will help you. So images and texts that are automatically AI generated will open you up to criticism online and sometimes laughter. The second funnel is the content funnel. And so a great tool here is WhisperFlow. Now, John Goodman was talking about this at the Two Brain Summit. What it does is it collects and edits client video stories via mobile prompts, which makes it really, really easy to showcase transformations and testimonials without scheduling interviews. So let's say that you're waiting in line outside or you're outside the coffee shop or the ice cream stand and you see a client walk by and you pick it up and you just tell that client story. WhisperFlow will turn that into a blog post for you that's really, really easy to just post, okay? You can also use ChatGPT's 4.0 mode to create consistent messaging, value-based scripts, and brand storytelling prompts to reinforce what makes your gym unique. So what I like to do sometimes in my gym is just have the GPT interview me. Hey, when did you first meet this client? What brought them into the gym? What's their favorite thing about the gym? What's your best story about this client? And it turns that into a blog post for me. It just feels really, really easy. Another one is a referral funnel. So the third marketing funnel that we teach is the referral funnel. Most gym owners are way too passive about referrals, but you can use a tool like Bonjoro to send personalized video requests for referrals. And then the AI recommends talking points and automatically reminds clients at the best moment that they should refer somebody, like after they've hit a PR or a milestone. You can also just use ChatGPT for this and build automated thank you notes, referral requests, and follow-up messages that sound personal but not templated or salesy, and then plug those into your client journey to automatically send with tools like GLM. I mean, let's face it. I've been asking people for referrals for a long time. I feel great about it because I know that I'm saving their spouse's life, their friend's life, their coworker's life. But I know a lot of new gym owners feel awkward about asking for referrals. And so it's easier just to record a video once, put it in a GLM workflow, and let it automatically send to every client after 90 days, something like that. It's very simple. You don't have to do it every time. Just get it out of your hands, but make sure it gets done. And this is a great example of systemizing, optimizing, and then automating. So the fourth funnel you want to build is a paid ads funnel. Now, you want to use Meta's tool to do this, basically, because it's It generates high converting ad images and copy based on your target audience, which is great if you're running meta or you're running Google ads and it's built in, right? So their meta is built in AI dynamically tests and optimizes ad performance for you. This used to be like learning chemistry. It was complicated. You really had to focus on it. A lot of gyms hated it. They would learn to do it through two brain and then they would choose to hire an agency from a place of knowledge, right? Like the wrong thing to do here is say, I hate ads, but I think I need them. I'm going to hire an agency to run them for me. The agency's incentive is to spend your entire budget. You need to learn how to do this, and then you can hand it off for much, much less with much, much greater results. And so that's what we do in Two Brain. But Meta has an AI learning system now, which takes a lot of the pain out. So if you used to run ads, if you've been running ads, but you hate it, really talk to a two-brain marketing mentor about how to use AI on the Meta platform, by the way, to optimize for you so that you're not constantly tracking and setting up spreadsheets and optimizing and tweaking and guessing. It takes the guesswork out of it. So you provide the assets like the pictures and the text, which by the way, two-brain gives you in the two-brain toolkit. And then Meta does the heavy lifting across the audiences and placements. So while the same picture might not work for my gym and your gym, I'm going to give you a lot of different pictures and let Meta do the testing, decide which one works best, and then just start running ads on that. And the fifth thing here, you know, there's really only four funnels that you need in your gym, but the safety net, right? The catch-all is SEO and search. And I think this is a really important point to make. SEO is going away, or at least it's changed so much that it will need a new name soon. More and people are letting ChatGPT or Gemini do their searching for them. They're not even going on Google anymore. ChatGPT now handles over a billion searches every week. So it's not just saying like, here's how to do this. What it's doing is actually searching the internet, finding the answer, and then presenting it back to the user. Now, even five years ago, Google was moving away from having clickable links on google.com to just putting the best answer right on the homepage. And now the process is just speeding up tenfold with Gemini and other AI agents, right? The information age is kind of over and the augmentation age is here. You know, the Wall Street Journal just had a great article last week about Google searches demise. Google is kind of panicking because it's realized like search is over and within a year or two, SEO will almost be irrelevant because the audience is no longer a person typing in a search query, but a bot that's actually doing the searching and presenting the answer instead of a link to an article that contains the answer. So, you know, what does this mean? Well, it means that the companies themselves... are pivoting. And it means it's a massive opportunity for you. Imagine that Google search had just launched today, knowing what you do now, you would have a massive advantage, right? You would know, okay, here's how I get everybody in my town to my site because they're using Google search. And I know exactly what keywords to use. I know to publish some content and that's going to like make Google point to me every single time. If you ranked number one in Google for the next three years, what kind of advantage would that give you? Well, this is your opportunity to do the same thing with bots. It's not quite the same as starting over because Gemini and the other chatbots still search the internet for information, but you can still gain a massive advantage if you act right now. Here's how to do it. First, publish a lot of quality content. Forget the SEO rank math and just tell the answer. Here's how to lose weight. Second, look for your brand on Reddit and make sure that you respond to posts. Do the same on Google My Business. If you have bad reviews or good Good reviews anywhere, start responding to all of them because that's what the bots are looking for. I don't know why they prioritize Reddit. I can't imagine like a more deceptive, negative place to find answers, but they do. And the key is that if you get criticism or if you get praise on Reddit or on Facebook reviews or Google reviews, you need to respond anyway so that the bot can decipher what's the truth and what's not. Next, you want to make sure that your website has a lot of stories and how to exercise videos on it. The most important visitors in the future will be bots, not humans. The humans will find their answers through the bots. So the bots will be coming to your website looking for the information. If they don't find it in a half a second, they're gone. They're going to go look somewhere else and report that back to the user. So make sure that you've got... you know, good content fast, and also make sure that your site loads fast because bots are going to grab the first info they can get. Instead of waiting for your site to load, they're going to move on to the next. So the battle for the fastest AI is already getting crazy, which is why companies like Nvidia have skyrocketing stock prices, but that's another post. Like this pursuit of speed in bot search is what has made Nvidia the world's first$4 trillion company, right? That's critical to understand. Next, forget the personal brand stuff. Nobody's out there searching for information about you. Should I look at Chris Cooper as a fitness coach? No. Which gym in my town is the best for me? That's what they're looking. Build your business brand. It's time to go hard on your business brand and put your own personal brand stuff on the back burner for now. If you do nothing else for the rest of 2025 and just focus on publishing content to build your business brand, you will be six months ahead of Look, it's not just search. 80% of consumers now resolve 40% of their online searches without clicking any links. This has a name. It's called zero-click search. That means they're using generative AI for shopping recommendations. OpenAI is about to add a Buy Now button that links to a merchant's website, which will let people shop through ChatGPT. That seems like a pretty obvious advantage for the merchant that's linked by the bot. Maybe that should be you, right? Traffic and ranking and average position and click-through rates, none of these metrics even make sense to chase going forward. Okay. So that's marketing, but I want to talk quickly about building culture and community and identity because AI can't lead people, but it can give you back the hours that you need to lead people better. So for example, you can automate your admin so that you can host a monthly seminar at your gym for prospects and clients and their families and friends. It can schedule your media posts so that you can show up and interview your clients more or coach more. You can use AI to take the results from your goal reviews. You got a little bot sitting there with you while you're doing a goal review, and it can turn those into podium posts. It can also change your programming to reflect what the majority of your gym actually needs. My final thought here is you don't need to fear AI. You need to use it to buy back your time so that you can lead like only a gym owner can. So start with the lowest value repetitive roles. While AI can't clean your toilet yet, it can perform tasks that are just as important, but might feel gross to you, right? Only you can define what a low value role means. And while I place a low priority on billing and a high priority on blogging, you might do the opposite and that's okay. The goal here is to use AI to buy back your time for the things that you're best at and love most. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And this discussion is ongoing. It happens every single day in our free group, GymOwnersUnited.com. You can join that group, you know, as long as your intentions are pure. I'm just kidding. As long as you're not a jerk, you're welcome in that group and you can discuss, you can ask questions, you can answer other people's questions, and we can talk about AI. I will say that that group is not run by bots. And so if you ask for something in that group and I respond, you're talking to a human and not a robot. So keep that in mind when we're chatting through Facebook Messenger, please. Thank you for your service. A bot can replace a lot of business tasks, but it can never replace you. The information age is over. The augmentation age is upon us. Use bots to help make you a better leader, gym owner, and fitness coach.