“The Golden Hour”: How This Daily Habit Saved Chris Cooper’s Gym

What if one simple daily habit could help you grow your gym?

In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," Chris Cooper invites you to join him in his Golden Hour—a daily routine that grew his gym and other businesses. 

This business-building hour is structured with the GOLDEN acronym:

- Go to a place where you can focus.
- Open your mind with a brain dump.
- Lead with marketing reps.
- Do your big projects.
- End at the hour.
- Next steps.

Chris details each component and provides specific examples, from creating content on Monday to mining leads on Thursday.

Tune in to see the exact process that's helped top Two-Brain gyms grow 32 times faster than the industry average.

Then get your free copy of “The Golden Hour” by Aug. 8, 2025, via the link below—and use it to transform your business.

Links

"The Golden Hour"

Gym Owners United

Book a Call  

5:13 - Get the free book on Amazon

6:11 - GOLDEN acronym breakdown

12:21 - Big projects vs. marketing reps

18:10 - Real wins from gym owners

23:05 - Why gym owners need hope

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey guys, good morning. It's Coop here. It's 5.30 AM and I'd like to invite you to join me for my golden hour. This is the first hour of my day when I come down here into my basement office and I do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. I'm going to walk you through that process and I've also taken you step-by-step through it in my book, The Golden Hour. You can get The Golden Hour for free this week. We'll be right back. Now, I get pretty excited talking about this stuff, so I'm going to try not to raise my voice because my family is sleeping. And that's one reason that the golden hour is so powerful. But if I wake anybody up, it'll be my golden doodle, Mr. Bingley. So if you see a little apricot colored snout poke up here, that's him joining me for the golden hour. All right, let's start with where to get the book. So you can see here, the normal price for the Kindle is$9.99. I'm giving it away for free this week because I want to help gym owners grow their gym. And when I was just about to write this book, I was actually focused on another project. I had another book in mind. It'll come out later this year. And my CMO, John Franklin said, yeah, Cooper, why don't you just write a book about what you do? And I said, well, what do you mean? What do I do? Like I I've written gym owners handbook. That's the definitive guide to growing a gym. And I've written founder farmer, tinker thief, like what you should do at different stages of your journey. And I've even written millionaire gym owner, which is what the best gym owners in the world do to reinvest and grow their empire. Like, what do you mean? What do I do? And John said, well, you know, you put out so much stuff, so much much productive content every single day. You're creating blog posts for Two Brainer, podcasts for Two Brainer. You're doing stuff for your gym or you're doing stuff on one of your other hobby sites. How do you produce so much stuff? And I said, well, it's this habit that I picked up 15 years ago where I just make a rule to every day do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. And he said, that's it. That's the book everybody needs to read. And I said, well, it's a pretty darn short book, right? I can write that on a napkin. And he said, yeah, but you need to tell people exactly what to do. And so that's the book that I wrote, Golden Hour. Here it is again. I'm going to start by giving you my rule, my process every single morning to spend one hour growing my business before I do anything else. First though, here's why this works. Every single day, you have two to three new ideas for growing your gym. And if you listen to a podcast, you've got four ideas. And if you listen to one of my books, you've got five ideas. And you go on Facebook or Instagram, and now you've got six ideas. And meanwhile, you're still getting to work at 6 a.m., you're coaching the two groups, and then somebody calls and you've got to answer this email. And before you know it, it's 6 or 7 p.m. at night. And if you even stop to think and you think like, what did I get done today that actually grew my business? you might be pretty hard pressed to name something. And that was me. I mean, when I started working with a mentor back in 2009, he would give me specific things to do. And when I would do them, they would work every single time. It was always effective. But I would take two weeks to do them. And I would sometimes not do them until the last minute before our next meeting. And sometimes he would have to tell me like, this weekend, you sit at your coffee table and you write your staff playbook. And that's what it kind of took. And the first instance of him giving me advice was like, the check would bounce if I didn't do the homework that he gave me over the weekend. And so under that kind of pressure, I usually do okay. And I'm sure you're the same way. But the truth is that if we took that power to focus, and we applied it every single day, then incrementally, we would grow our business. And a lot of gym owners overestimate what they can do in a day, but they underestimate what they can do in a year. And if you can stick to this practice of doing one thing every day to grow your business before you do anything else, your gym could double in a year. In fact, when I studied and I was getting some data for this book and I studied the top gyms in Two Brain, these gyms are growing 32 times faster than anybody else. Even the other gyms in Two Brain, they're growing like twice as fast as them who are growing like eight times as fast as the industry, et cetera. And if you look at the industry average growth rate and you look at these top gyms in Two Brain, they're growing 32 times faster. So every thousand dollars a month you grow, they're growing like$32,000 a month. It's I know it sounds unbelievable, but it's the truth. than the book and longer than my golden hour if I don't get to it. So here's what I want you to do. You grab the book on Amazon, you get it on Kindle, it's free. Once you've got the book, you go to goldenhourchallenge.com. Let me show you this site next. So here we are on Kindle, boop, we get the book. We go to goldenhourchallenge.com and you just enter your name, your phone, and your email address. And what that does is it gives you access to the Golden Hour Resource Hub. So what this is going to do is first give you a video walkthrough from me wearing a collared shirt, looking really impressive. Like I don't look at 5.30 AM and I'm walking you through the challenge step-by-step. What do I do? I'm going to give you a checklist you can download. You can just check this off. I like pen and paper. That helps me really stay on top of things. You can stick it to your fridge. I've got it stuck to my door over there. By the way, I'm on day 489 of my golden hour habit streak as I record this today. Then there's an invitation to join our free Facebook group called Gym Owners United, where you can jump in and talk about doing the Golden Hour Challenge, ask questions, that kind of thing. And then I'm going to go video by video, step by step. Here's all the things that you need to do to do the Golden Hour Challenge. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. So let's start with what do you do in the Golden Hour to grow your gym? Well, here's the recipe. And if you don't understand any of this, Don't worry about it. I'm going to walk you through it in the book and in the free course at goldenhourchallenge.com. So the G is go to a place where you can focus. What happens is if we go to work and we start working, we get a ringing phone. We get emails. We get people knocking on the door, knocking on the window. We get a noisy class starting. We get background music. You just can't focus. And so you need to go to a quiet place where you can focus. Hey, if you do best in a coffee shop or you do best with some background music in your headphones, that's fine. I do best with absolute silence. But you need to go to a place where you will not be interrupted. Okay. Then you need to open your mind. Look, when you wake up in the morning, you're probably carrying like some lingering bad feelings or some anger or some stress or something that's blocking you. That's stopping you from focusing something you're going to ruminate on. Maybe it's something that your spouse argued with you about last night, or maybe it's like a to-do list. Oh, I got to get to the gym early and sweep up the toilets or whatever. Okay. the first thing that you have to do is a brain dump. You got to clean all that crap out of your brain so your brain is open and ready to focus. And so I do a written meditation called 750 words every single morning. You can do it spoken. You can certainly talk into your phone and just do a brain dump. That's all you're doing. Okay. So that's opening your mind. Those two things together, maybe take about 10 minutes. Then you want to lead with some marketing reps. So before you do anything else, you're doing some marketing. Now, these marketing reps are different day by day. I'm going to walk you through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or a few days anyway, in a moment, but you're going to put these things on repeat. See, when you're really growing your gym, there are some big projects that you do once that move you forward. And then there are small projects like reps, but you have to do all the time, at least weekly. And it's putting these things on repeat that actually grows your gym. And then the big projects help you take like multiple steps forward at once. Okay. So you're For example, on Monday, I want you to create a little bit of content. I want you to do a short video to tell people about your method, about zone two, about how to eat healthy fats, what supplements they should take, whatever. Teach your audience. This is more important than ever. When I wrote the book, AI was around, but as I record this video a year later, AI and GPTs are replacing search. They're knocking SEO off. Off the board, it's more important than ever that whatever bot is out there searching for information finds your information. And so you have to produce content now more than ever. I thought it was critical to produce content just to win the SEO battle. It's way more important now than it ever has been. You don't have to write a blog. You don't have to do a podcast with a fancy setup. My mic isn't even plugged in as I do this. You don't even have to have the ring light that I have there. All you need to do is like record your thoughts into a podcast and you can even use AI to cheat. But in the book, I've got like 30 different topics that you can riff on. You can literally pretend you're being interviewed by me on this podcast. And I'm saying, why did you start your gym? And then over to you and you record into your phone. And I tell you in the book, like exactly how to publish that. And by the way, if you go to golden hour challenge.com, I'm going to give you, here's a video, a nine minute video that will take you through exactly what to record, where to put it. Okay. And like how to, Produce a podcast in nine minutes, nine minutes, 22 seconds, in fact. Then on Tuesday, what you're going to do is you're going to distribute that content. So social media is an amplifier. So you build your content. It's a blog post, it's a YouTube video, or it's a podcast. Now you got to get it out to everybody though. You got to make sure that it reaches your people. So you're going to share on Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, LinkedIn, whatever other platforms you use. And I've got a step-by-step video to show you how to do that too at goldenhourchallenge.com. This video is seven minutes, 34 seconds. Okay. Then on Wednesday, you're going to reach out to five clients and book some goal reviews. I've been talking about goal reviews for a decade, how important they are to client retention and client ascension, moving them up the chain to better and more coaching. And I wanted to give you a flow chart to follow to help you get people booked in for goal reviews. And if people come in and they're totally happy and they love what they're doing, great. They don't have to change anything, but they should give you a testimonial. And so in this goal review chat, I tell you like, here's what to say exactly verbatim. You can read it. And I also walk you through it on Wednesday. You go check in with five clients. There's the video on exactly how to do it. It's a two minute, 37 second lesson. So you can just go out there and do it and get action. And then of course, you know, we go all the way through the week. So Thursday, you're going to mine your leads. You're going to use your CRM. Okay. You're going to look at former clients. You're going to look at people who came in, did a no sweat intro, but didn't sign up. You're going to look at people who booked, but didn't show up. You're going to look at people who quit the gym and you haven't heard from in a few months. And you're going to follow up with five of them. Now, following up with five leads does not sound like much, does it? But the reality is that if you do that once a week, every week, that's like 260 leads. Imagine if even one lead in 10 showed up and signed up at your gym. I mean, that's a very low close rate, but that's still 26 new clients just from doing this every Wednesday. And by the way, at this point in the golden hour, We're not even halfway done yet. You know, so if I go back to the golden acronym here, we're through going to a place where you can focus, opening your mind and leading with some marketing reps. You're not even half an hour in and we've done enough to generate you at least 26 new clients. Okay. In 30 minutes a day. After that, you're going to do your big projects. So the marketing reps are there to get you incremental gains. You know, book five goal reviews, check in with five leads, et cetera. If you're really good at this, you can make that 10 goal reviews and 10 leads or whatever. The point though, is that you build the habit first. And then eventually as you practice that habit will turn into a skill, but you're going to want to do your big projects. So what are these big projects? Well, if I'm looking at the projects that we do most often in Two Brain, we start off by building an on-ramp and then building a no sweat intro, a prescriptive sales process to sell your on-ramp. And then from there, we build four different marketing funnels to bring in leads to do the sales process to sell your on-ramp. And then we keep moving out from there. So we'll build a retention project, a 90-day client journey. We'll build a financial project. You'll learn how to read a P&L, profit and loss statement, and act on it. We'll build a better sales project. So we'll build a sales binder to help you sell more easily. We'll build a funnel audit project so that you know where the leads are leaking out of your funnel, et cetera. And so we walk through all of these projects, usually in about the first six, eight weeks of Two Brain, because when people have time to do it, they get this stuff done. Now, look, if you weren't doing this challenge and you weren't making an appointment with yourself for an hour every single day, I could tell you exactly how to do all this stuff and you'd probably not get half of it done. At Two Brain, people are getting this stuff done in weeks, a couple of months, because they've built this focus time into their schedule to actually do the work. And that's what a mentor does. They teach you how to build more product, be more productive. They teach you and help you establish the habits and then turn those habits into skills. And that's why the gym owners that go through Two Brain Mentorship are not just learning about like how to run a free trial class for their CrossFit group. They're learning skills that will make them a better entrepreneur for the next 30 years. Trust me, it's taken me 30 years, 29 years to learn these skills and teach them back in a way that they're relatable and immediately actionable. So you don't have to keep bumping your head off the learning curve of trying to get this stuff in there. I've made it really simple for you. It's in the book, Golden Hour. It's at goldenhourchallenge.com. There's videos to follow. all. There's templates to use. We run these challenges all the time, even within Two Brain, because this process of the golden hour is so, so, so effective that I know it gets our clients results way faster than they would even through one-on-one mentorship alone. So we always start with establishing a golden hour habit with our clients, and then we start giving them the projects that will help them grow their specific gym. All right. So let's go back to the acronym here because, hey, we're not done. We're still within that hour. And by the way, I'm still within my time limit here too. So The next thing we're going to do is do your big projects. Usually your mentor will help you pick these. Chris, I want you to write a staff playbook. That was one of the first things from my mentor. The very first thing, by the way, was like send an email to my email list. Here's what to write. He wrote it down on his chalkboard and I invited people to buy a package of personal training sessions. This was 2009. I made$500 from that first email. That was enough to pay the mentor, but it was enough to give me momentum to continue. It was like, whoa, I actually can do this. And And the next project was hire a cleaner, et cetera. And so it took me a couple of days to write the cleaning checklist, to find the cleaner, to hire the cleaner, and then to move on to the next project. Those are the big projects. The marketing reps move your business forward every single day. They keep the flywheel turning. The big projects help you move forward in leaps and bounds, but most importantly, they stop you from sliding backward again. A lot of the time when gym owners hire a marketing agency or they start doing a new marketing technique, they get some leads and they get really, really excited, but they don't do anything to to stop them from rolling right back down the hill when that marketing stops working. And so I'm very concerned about that. And that's what we do in Two Brain. The next most important thing is that you end at the hour. This is an AMRAP. You want to get as much done within the hour because I don't want you to go all out, spend 90 minutes in flow state on week one. And then week two, you got nothing left. You're exhausted. If anything, I want you to finish the hour with like, okay, here's where I have to start tomorrow. And you've got a checklist to start from. This is an old trick that I learned from Ernest Hemingway. You finish in the middle of a sentence, you know where you're starting tomorrow. So let's say that you're reaching out to five leads and you get engaged in conversation with four of them and you didn't get the fifth one done, start the next day with that fifth one. Or you start writing a blog post and wow, you're really in flow state, you're really rocking now and every idea leads to the next idea. And the next Monday, when you're writing more content, you've got a list of new ideas to write with. The thing about the golden hour is it just gets easier and easier as you go. And unlike the old one and done strategy that most of us use for marketing, you just put it on repeat. It becomes what you automatically do. That's when you know it's a habit and then it eventually becomes a skill. And then the next steps are basically you're writing your to-do list for the day. So I take the last five minutes of my golden hour. I open up Google Tasks and I write down, here's what I need to complete today. Okay. So Go to a place where you can focus, open your mind, do a brain dump, lead with your marketing reps, which I break down for you here, goldenhourchallenge.com. Here's all of your marketing reps, step-by-step exactly what to do with some templates. Then do your big projects, the stuff that's assigned to your mentor, the stuff that's been sitting on your to-do list, the stuff that you found in my books. end of the hour, even if you're not completely done, or even if you could spare another five minutes, end of the hour anyway, and then write down your to-do list of your next steps. That's the golden hour. I mean, it sounds really, really simple, but the best ideas often are. And if we think about like, what did I do to save my gym? And what did I do to grow my gym? And what did I do to grow and sell to other businesses? And then what did I do to grow Two Brain? It's the golden hour. And this is the practice that I do every day, including right now. And if you See me glance upward. It's because I hear the pitter patter of little golden doodle feet. So it won't be long until we're joined by Mr. Bingley here. Before I sign off and go to do the work that will grow my gym this morning, I wanted to share with you some of the wins that we've had from people doing the Golden Hour Challenge. Now, if you go to JimMorrisUnited.com, that's our free group, just do a search for Golden Hour Challenge, and you'll see dozens and dozens of people posting the wins that they've had just doing the Golden Hour for free on their own without a mentor even. But with the help of a mentor guiding you to do your next best step, exactly the right thing for you at exactly the right time, the results just multiply and compound. So I wanted to share some of those from our group just this morning. It's already early, but We're in the middle of a golden hour challenge and my friends in Europe have already been crushing it for about five hours. I wanted to share some of the wins that they shared with me this morning. So I put up a prompt and a few of them are already done their golden hour challenge so far. I asked them, what's your biggest win from the golden hour challenge? This gentleman from Finland said, I've got new blog posts and social media and ads are scheduled for our upcoming on-ramp. I mean, he hadn't done that before. The biggest win from the golden hour challenge so far, It would be easy for me to talk about the new clients, the new sold on-ramp courses or money. But for me, the real win is how much one focused hour in the morning frees up space in my mind and time in my calendar. By the way, this gentleman's on vacation with his family for the first time in several years while he writes this. And I love it. that he shares his little stopwatch at the end too. Isn't that so cool? Next, the biggest win is living less reactively. You're not playing defense anymore. You're playing offense. You're growing your business. Each day has purpose and moves the business forward. As a result, I find myself more productive, less stressed, and way more present in what I'm doing. I'll tell you something. When you start your day by doing one thing to grow your business, then it's done. And for the rest of the day, if nothing else goes your way, if you're sidetracked, sidelined, distracted, overwhelmed, burdened, brain fog, At the end of the day, you can still say, yep, did one thing to grow my business. If something takes a wrong turn, the school calls, come and pick up your daughter. She's sick and you have to go do that. You don't get this sense of FOMO, like, oh, I should be working on my business or stress or guilt or overwhelm. You can say, no, I did my thing to grow my business today. And with a clear mind and open conscience, do what you should do as a dad. This woman said, wasn't the most productive golden hour because downloading the photos took longer than I thought, but I got a bit done. I skimmed scheduled a blog, and I made my social media posts. My biggest win from the golden hour is focusing on one or two things that helped grow my business instead of working on running my business, which also needs to be done after the fact. Of course, this is the time when you are running your business instead of your business running you. That's how I like to think about it. This one says, my biggest win is just getting back into the routine of one small task to grow the business before getting swallowed up by the craziness. We've seen a crazy amount of new group and one-on-one members since the summit, but the The golden hour has helped me stay focused on my responsibility to grow the business. Yes, you are the boss. You're the CEO. It is your job to grow the business. It's your job to grow the business. I've seen that twice. Nobody else is going to grow this for you. You can't hire a marketing agency to grow your business for you. It is your job to grow the business. It is not your job necessarily to clean the floors, but the buck stops with you. It is your job to grow your business. If you look back at yesterday and you can't tell me exactly what you did to grow your business, like precisely, I did exactly this, then you need to pick up a golden hour book today for free and start on this habit. By the way, coaching classes really, really well and polishing the toilets does not grow your business. If you can't Can't tell me what you did to grow your business. Your business probably didn't grow yesterday. This woman said, biggest win being able to do the golden hour each day instead of just the first three days of the week. Every day has a different focus instead of trying to do everything every single day. Yes, when you try to do everything, usually you get nothing done. But if you focus on one single thing every day, these things compound and grow on each other. His biggest win is that his mind is at ease. Incredible. This woman says, I actually got vulnerable in my blog post today. Now I'll tell you, as somebody who does this regularly, and I've been journaling for over a decade, Sometimes you just need to cleanse that palate to feel better about yourself, better about your business, better about your relationships. And she says that her biggest win is having this focus time. I don't feel behind like it was feeling. It's still a work in progress. I don't always get up as early as I like, depending on the night with three littles, but I remind myself consistency over perfection. I have strong perfectionist tendencies. And so this is big for me. I, I'm with you. I feel the same way. This woman says, I've completed 12 out of 21 days. This is a win for me because it's forward progress and I'm not beating myself up for not having 100%. I'm also writing a lot more. I'm slow at it, but it feels good to be journaling my thoughts and using that to create authentic blogs. look, here's the real secret of the golden hour. This is not a productivity book. This is not just like a habits book or a morning routines book. This is a book about hope. The reason that most gym owners fail is not because their coaches leave and take their clients or the new gym opens up down the street and it's funded by mom and dad with all the money and stuff. That is not what causes gyms to fail. It's not lack of excellence, it's spotting the flaw or lack of credentialing. That's not it. Gyms fail when the owners run out of hope. That means they can't see a light at the end of the tunnel. They've been working hard. They mean well. They put all their money and all their time into this. They're exhausted. They're frustrated. Maybe they're broke. And they just They can't see a way forward. That was certainly me. You know, I, I knew that I could work hard. I could grind 50 or 60 hours a week, my entire life. I could go without, you know, I could tighten my belt. I could skip meals. It didn't matter to me as long as my kids were fed and, you know, and I was seeing them once a day. But when I just couldn't figure out how things were ever going to get better, that's when I temporarily lost hope. And I didn't get the hope back until I started working with a mentor. And he gave me one thing to do to grow my business. And I did it. And it worked. It wasn't that I made$500 from his first advice. It was that, oh, there actually is a path forward here that I can do this work. And if I do what I'm told... this business can grow. Hope has two parts. One part is a clear vision of the future. You have to be able to see like, here's where I'm going. And the other is clarity on what you're going to do today. I know as a gym owner, you're willing to do the work. I know as a gym owner, you're humble. I know that you're in this for the right reasons, but if you don't have a clear picture of where you're going and clarity on what you have to do today, you're going to lose hope eventually. It happens to all of us. It happens to every entrepreneur. And so doing the golden hour gives you hope because it proves to you, I can do that. I can do the work that actually will grow my business. I can see an end point for myself. And I know that if I just show up and do one thing every day to grow my business before I do anything else, it will grow. And those growth moments strategies will compound over time. I'll be able to build a gym that can feed my family, a gym that can create a career opportunity for my coaches, and most importantly of all, a gym that will save lives. That's what we're here for, right? And I'm here to help you get there. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. My book is The Golden Hour. It's probably my favorite book that I've ever done. And I wrote it right from the heart at 5.30 a.m., right in this office where I'm sitting right now and talking to you with my golden doodle beside me. It's free this week. You can grab it. You can go to goldenhourchallenge.com. You can watch the videos, read the book, use the videos as a resource. Just do it. Try it for 30 days and see if your business improves. I guarantee it will. And if you can do it for 90 days, you're going to see hope. You're going to see a future. You're going to see, yes, I can do this. And you're