From Broke to Wealthy: The 4-Phase Gym Owner Blueprint

Overwhelmed by conflicting business advice? Cut through the noise with Chris Cooper’s proven system for building wealth as a gym owner.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris explains how to move beyond the passion-first mentality that keeps most fitness entrepreneurs stuck and broke.

He breaks down his four-phase roadmap for gym-owner wealth: Founder, Farmer, Tinker and Chief. These phases show you what to focus on right now, what to ignore and how to move toward financial freedom.

Coop also shares candid stories from his early years of gym ownership, including mopping floors personally and trapping his business in Founder Phase. Everything changed when he focused on fixing the foundation first, stopped trying to market a broken gym, and started doing the right things as a CEO and business owner.

Now as the CEO of Two-Brain Business, Cooper has helped thousands of fellow gym owners fix their businesses, too. He’s minted more than 60 millionaire gym owners, and hundreds more are earning over $100,000 per year.

It’s time to break free from day-to-day operations and start building wealth. Tune in to get the full blueprint.

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1:28 - Why gym owners get stuck

7:44 - Founder Phase

10:51 - Farmer Phase

14:34 - Tinker Phase

19:36 - Chief Phase

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

You didn't open a gym to get rich. Neither did I. We opened a gym to make a difference and not to make money. But if you don't learn how to make money, you won't survive. The truth is that we're passionate about fitness and that drives us to start a gym, but it doesn't keep a gym open. I'd hate for your gym to go out of business because you're out of money when you still got lots of passion left over. And I can remember the day when I realized that just being the best coach in town was not going to be enough. enough to keep the lights on. Entrepreneurs go through four phases of maturity on their growth path. And so that first phase we call the founder phase when you're starting up and you're grinding and you're hustling. And the second phase we call the farmer phase when you're cultivating different ideas and growing your people. The third phase we call the tinker phase when you've got good systems in place in one location and you're looking to reinvest or expand. And the fourth phase is called the chief phase when you're focused on growing other leaders within your tribe. These four phases serve as a roadmap to show you what to focus on right now, what you can ignore or put aside for later, and how to build toward financial freedom. Today on this podcast, I'm going to walk you through the four phases and share some stories from my own journey from the Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief book, which is now getting updated for today's economy and becoming the Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief book in the future. I want to talk about why most GMOers get stuck first. We're all subject to a lot of advice now. You know, when I was starting out, it was hard to find business advice. And most of the stuff that I was finding was wrong. It was just, you know, we're all a bunch of alphas out there and nobody wants to admit when they're doing not very well. And everybody kind of plays up how well they're doing. And it's really easy to think that everybody's doing better than you. And the reality is that very few people in the fitness industry are actually doing well, no matter how many you see claiming it. And so you get get stuck because you get all this advice and you get it on podcasts and you get it from books and you get it from videos just like this one. And you don't really know like who's telling the truth, who should you listen to, who is kind of overplaying their hand a little bit and who's just trying to take your money. Let's face it. How do you know that? And the problem is that with all this information coming in, you get overwhelmed. You get paralyzed. Like, ah, maybe I should focus on TikTok. Maybe I should be doing Instagram stuff. I got to go clean the floor. I got to run this class. What about my own fitness? And you find yourself at the end of every single day looking back and going, man, my gym didn't really grow anything today. I hope it grows tomorrow. I hope something different happens tomorrow. But the difference that has to happen is you. You have to mature as an entrepreneur. You have to move out of the founder phase and into the farmer phase. I'm going to tell you how to do that today. The most important thing is that you can focus on the work that you need to do right now and not try and do everything, follow every launch, read every book, because you're just going to get more knowledge without actually changing your business. When I found my first mentor, the best thing that he gave me was focus. And I went into this first meeting and I thought like, okay, Dennis is going to teach me how to market. And he said, Chris, I've heard stories about your gym. You do not want people like me coming to your gym right now because we'll come in once, we might be pulled light about it, but we'll leave and we won't come back. You need to fix your gym first. You need to make it appealing to the audience that you want to attract. You need it to be attractive to people so that they stay once you do start the marketing. Don't buy any advertising like you're tempted to. And that's actually what launched me down this path. I started a blog called don'tbuyads.com as a reminder to myself that advertising a poor gym was just going to kill me in the long run, that people would come in and they would go out too quickly. So what did I actually need to do at that phase? Well, that's what Dennis walked me through, and I'm going to share that with you now. The problem was that I was about four years into gym ownership at that stage, at that time in my career, but I was still in the founder phase. I was still trying to do everything myself. I had hired staff, but I was micromanaging them. Nothing was written down. All the decisions were in my head. I thought everybody just knew what I knew because it was common sense. I was mopping. I was coaching the classes. I was working out. I was answering the phone. I was paying the bills. I was running the payments. I was doing the sales and in the leftover time I was doing the marketing. So of course I wasn't doing the marketing at all. And I had this, um, I had this opportunity to work on a corporate partnership and I thought, Oh boy, I got to jump on this. And I actually brought this to the first meeting I ever had with my mentor, Dennis. I'm like, how do I lock this down? It's going to go away. I'm going to miss this opportunity. And he's like, Chris, if you bring these people into your gym right now, they will hate it. They'll tell their friends and they'll never be back. He gave me that tough love. And, you know, he had me start by cleaning my bathrooms. Okay, I get it that this is a long play, but I was still very impatient. And then he had me hire a cleaner with money I didn't really have, but he had me reinvest that time into marketing. And it's a story that I've shared a few times, but I paid that cleaner$15 for the hour and I made$450 and the light bulb started to go on. Okay. The thing is here, like a lot of us think that the Because our gym has been open for a while that we must know what we're doing, right? Like we've dodged the bullets. But what we can't tell from inside is that maybe we've been lucky. Maybe we haven't really faced any hardship yet. You know, it's really easy to be a good business owner when the market is good. It's really hard to be a good business owner when the market isn't good. A rising sea lifts all boats. And then when the tide goes out, we see who's not wearing a bathing suit. And this is really like an important thing to understand is that you might be still in the founder phase, even though you've been doing this for a long time. There are a lot of gyms out there who have been around for a decade, 20 years even, and they've survived, but they've never really grown. And the owner is burned out and they're not making any money. I do not call these people successful entrepreneurs. And so you can't skip steps. You've got to solve the founder problems, then the farmer problems, then the tinker problems, and then worry about the chief problems in stages. I'll give you an example of skipping steps. steps. When my gym was brand new, I was getting advice from CrossFit discussion boards, from the NSCA discussion boards, from Yahoo groups, everywhere I could find to get advice. And the recurring advice that seems to have been buried now is like, you start really, really small in the smallest space you can find. You sign the shortest term lease you can find. You build your own equipment. And only when people are doing burpees on the sidewalk outside do you start thinking about expansion. That message has been kind of lost But a lot of those owners were actually fine in their first couple of years, the people who started tiny, tiny and scaled up. Now what you see is people signing these big leases on these micro gyms, 10,000 square feet that they don't even need. They're signing up managers and coaches in advance and paying them salaries before they've got a dollar in revenue. And so they're actually trying to like build this mansion and they have no foundation. They're skipping steps. They're trying to jump straight into farmer phase instead of building up slow and building a solid foundation. And then of course, when any little thing doesn't go as planned, the build out didn't get done on time. The tax man shows up. I didn't have the right guardrails in my bathroom and I can't open. Like any of these things will kill you. You become super duper fragile if you try to skip steps. Now that I've got all that out of the way, let's go through the phases. The first phase of gym ownership is called the founder phase. The purpose of the founder phase or your goal is to get to break even as quickly as you can. We teach strategies for this in our Start a Gym program at 2Brain to help get you up above the water level so that you're not losing money, okay? Your job is like to prove your concept works before you start bringing in staff. So prove that the group model is going to work for you by coaching groups. Prove that personal training is effective by doing some personal training. Later, you can leverage staff to take those things off your plate and level yourself up to the CEO. And you need to also do the non-coaching roles. You need to be cleaning. You need to be doing the bookkeeping, but your job is to document the process so that you can get those things off your plate quickly. The first time you ever clean your gym, you should be writing down exactly what you do. Where did you put the soap? Do you use hot water or cold water, et cetera, so you can get that off your plate eventually quickly. But in the founder phase, you're going to be wearing every hat until you document the process, and then you can hire somebody else. You also need to keep your expenses minimal. You need to bootstrap wherever you can so that you know where the money is coming from and where the money is going. You need to develop systems for financial tracking and watching your cash flow instead of just checking your bank account every morning like I did for the first four years. As soon as you develop those things, you can start to ascend and hire other staff. There are a lot of pitfalls here though, right? If you think like, oh, I'm the real CEO, I'm going to hire somebody to do the cleaning and somebody to do the bookkeeping and somebody, then you won't understand how those jobs are done and you won't be able to lead somebody else effectively. You won't be able to coach them to do better or even evaluate how well they're doing. You'll be shooting from the hip, you know, making guesses from your gut all the time instead of actually being prepared to lead these people to do better. You know, rock climbers have an analogy that the first person to ascend the climb is the one that names it. You need to be the first person to ascend every climb in your business. You need to be the first to run payroll so that you can document it. You need to be the first to clean so that you can document it. You need to be the first to do the social media posting so that you can documented. Until it's documented, you can't hand it off to anybody else. This is part of how you get out of founder phase. I was really lucky. I was terrified and I had no money. And so the money that I spent at startup was very carefully spent. Yeah, I wasted some. Definitely. I bought a lat crossover machine that I never, ever used. But the reality is that in that phase, I was okay. I can grind. I can work a 70-hour week and I can be tight with money. Eventually, though, you're going to get burned out of the founder phase and you need to evolve to get into the farmer phase. You just can't skip that step of writing down your SOPs and your processes and documenting exactly how you do things. Because as soon as you hire somebody, you're trying to move into the farmer phase. And if you haven't done that stuff, you're going backward. You're just going to wind up wasting a ton of money and time trying to micromanage somebody who doesn't know what to do correctly or coach somebody who's just not going to get any better. Okay, so now you're in farmer phase. The goal here is to build predictable personal income. This is how you know that your business works, is that you're able to pay yourself what you deserve to be paid. Before you hire anybody else full-time, you have to prove that your business is capable of paying somebody full-time. That's you. You're the crash test dummy for the business. You cannot ask somebody else to quit their full-time job or tie their future to you until you know that the business is capable of paying somebody full-time. That has to be you first. Okay? There's other reasons for this, too, for paying yourself first. Let's face it. Nobody goes out of business because their staff quits. Everybody goes out of business when they can't eat, when the owner can't pay themselves. That's what kills gyms. There's 10,000 former CrossFit gyms that have gone out of business. If you find any of those owners online, they're not bragging about it, but if you can find them, they'll tell you, the reason I went out of business was XYZ. I was too stressed. I was working too hard. I got burned out. Another gym opened up next door. It's CrossFit's fault. It's the other gym's fault. It's my coach's fault. It's my client's fault. But the bottom line to all these is money. Money solves the stress problem. Money solves the overwork problem. Money solves the competition problem. If you have money, these things are not problems. The reason that these gyms all go out of business, eventually, if you dig deep enough, is that the owner didn't make enough money. And so you need to pay yourself first. The next core action in the farmer phase is is to hire. But you have to hire the lowest value roles first. You have to hire the cleaner, the admin. Before you hire a group coach or a personal trainer to replace yourself, you start by investing in the lower value roles, buying yourself back some time, and then reinvesting that time into high value roles like marketing and sales. To successfully hire these people, you have to have playbooks, checklists, things for them to follow so that they know how to do their job. And you need to avoid the technician's curse, which we we all do of going out and hiring another coach. Because if you try to hire a replacement for yourself in your primary delivery role, you will spend all your time thinking about what they're doing wrong because they'll never live up to your expectations. Instead, hire a cleaner or an admin, give them a checklist, give them a playbook. You do that. I'm going over here to do this. I'm going to learn marketing. I'm going to do sales. Okay. You also need to keep an eye on the money. So you have to understand that you're building a platform on which other people can build careers. And so instead of paying your staff a salary right out of the gate and jeopardizing your own income, which jeopardizes the whole gym for everybody, you need to adopt models of how you're paying people for their time. We teach this in Two Brain. It's called entrepreneurialism. You're giving people the opportunity to make a living with your clients on your platform, with your systems, and you can pay them up to 44% of the revenue collected by their service. This is amazing for them if you think about it because it's so much cheaper than them starting their own business. And 44% is more than you're making on any of the other services in your business too. You also need to look at your pricing, look at your marketing. Like farmer phase is busy, it's chaotic, it's crazy. But if you set yourself up properly in the founder phase, you'll get through it much more easily. If you try to ascend too quickly and just delegate or abdicate responsibility for growth and running your gym, you're just gonna go backward and you're gonna get pulled right back into being a founder again. in. Once you've got this dialed, and you're making the income that you need to live on for your gym, okay, not just a little bit of income, not just enough, but like the income that pays for your perfect day. Now you can ascend to the third phase, which is tinker. And the purpose of the tinker phase is to build your net worth and secure your financial freedom. You have to protect the golden goose, right? The goose that lays the golden eggs, that's your gym, you have to protect that. The best way to protect it is to have cash flow and investments that That will help you ward off all the stuff that's coming in the future. time off because you have to understand you are a mental athlete. And we know what happens when athletes overtrain, right? Burnout and injury. If you're just working all the time and not taking a five-day vacation once in a while or not hiring a coach to do your nutrition programming or not, you know, riding your bike, taking care of yourself, you will get injured and your business will be the thing that suffers. People in the tinker phase take the extra time and extra money that their business is now generating and they reinvest it in one of four places. First, they scale their operations. So they might open more locations using the system that they develop because it works. Second, they might take the money and invest it in stocks or property or crypto. Many of the gym owners in Two Brain wind up buying the building that their gym is in. But if that's not affordable, they might buy a different building or they might put the money somewhere else. They get the money out of their business and get it working for them instead of leaving it there to be taxed or sued away. They also invest in themselves. They invest in their leader They invest in mentorship and they invest in health, their lifestyle. They invest in their mental state. They invest in their physical state. They get coaches. They take breaks. Maybe they buy a really cool bicycle like I did. The pitfalls in Tinker Stage are a little bit of freedom. You know, for the first time, you've got a little bit of extra time, a little bit of extra money, and you've been ruminating on different ideas, maybe for a decade, you know, maybe for five years, one year. And you think like, now I've got time to do this. to open that coffee shop, right? I've got a successful business. Why don't I start over in a business that I know nothing about and just totally destroy my life again? And I have this story. I ran into a good friend of mine from my powerlifting days. After, you know, 10, 15 years of opening my gym, I ran into him at this gas station. And in the back of my truck was my bike. And he's like, hey, man, that's a cool bike. What are you doing? And I'm like, well, you know, I'm not training in the gym very often anymore. I'm training on the bike. I just love being outside the gym. And he's like, And he laughed and he said, yeah, you know, I always wondered how you could train in the business that you own. Like most entrepreneurs, they don't want to go to their own restaurant for lunch. They don't want to work out in their own gym. It's just, it's too distracting. And I said, yeah, well, you know, I learned that lesson the hard way. And he's like, well, what's next for you? And I said, oh, my wife and I are going to open this little cafe. And he says, Coop, why would you ruin the other thing that you love in life? And that hit me hard. And he's right. Like what I should do is make money from my gym and go to cafes and drink their coffee instead of having to own it. There's a process and we mature as entrepreneurs at each stage. And one of the signs that you're maturing in the Tinker stage is that you're not tempted to try and do everything. Because as entrepreneurs, we have so many ideas. We need to learn that we could do anything, but we can't do everything. And we don't need to do anything right now. You know, there's so many stories from our Tinker program. These are the top 100 gym owners in the world. And, you know, many of them will dabble a little bit bit. They'll buy some crypto, they'll buy some stocks, they'll do an Airbnb or some buy a laundromat or I bought a self-storage business. They'll dabble a bit. They'll try a few things and then they'll quickly learn like, I'm not that interested in Airbnbs or actually the self-storage business is not as passive as I thought. And they'll come back to one or two primary investments. The thing that they have to remember is that you want to have like one or two high-risk investments and one or two conservative investments and that's it. Because every other investment has this learning curve, trial and error. It's distracting. You also have to remember that your gym is a high-risk investment, and you will always need to pay attention to that as long as you own it. So, so far, the founder phase is about starting a business, right? Setting yourself up for long-term wealth and leverage and control of your destiny for you and your family. The farmer phase is about buying back your time by hiring staff or, you growing the business until it's paying you as much as you want to earn. The tinker phase is when you're earning as much as you want to, and now you need to reinvest for the future so you're not living this grind life for the next 30 years. And finally, the chief phase is about creating other leaders and expanding your impact to your community. So years ago when I wrote Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief, I thought that the point of tinker phase especially was make lots of money and give it away. And so I envisioned the last stage of entrepreneurship as more like a Robin Hood phase. You know, the Bill Gates, I'm going to start a foundation and I'm going to take money from myself, from my friends, and I'm going to give it to people who need money. And I'm going to give it my time to people who need mentorship. And I'm going to give my time to charities like the local food bank that just need bodies on the ground. And to me, that seemed really noble. But what I forgot was that as noble as Robin Hood is, You know, in the thief phase, and as great as it is to have lots of money to give away, no entrepreneur has ever done. The thief phase, in hindsight, kind of feels like, okay, I'm done with business. And the reality is that our society needs entrepreneurs to continue with business. You know, our entire society, our democracy, our economy, our healthcare system, our roads, our policing, all of these things rest on the free market economy. What builds that economy? What pays for the policing and the healthcare and the insurance and the government even? You know, it's the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs are the only ones that build the economy. The entrepreneurs are the ones that generate the taxes that pay for all that other stuff. The entrepreneurs are the ones who create the jobs. Governments don't create jobs. Unions don't create tax revenue. The markets don't create money that pays for our social services or our way of life. Entrepreneurs do. Only entrepreneurs do. All those other things follow the success of entrepreneurs. We need more entrepreneurs building a bigger foundation if we want to continually grow and improve our society. And that's what chief phase is all about. And so in hindsight, while I do think it's important to make money and give it away because lots of people need money who are not good at making it, that's only one component of our responsibility. Thief phase is an opportunity. Chief phase is a responsibility let's face it there are a lot of things that are threatening our way of life and our society right now there's a lot of upheaval you know and ai is part of that and there's always other things that are part of it too these things will never go away the buttress against totally destroying our society going backward is wealth you know if if our society has lots of wealth then we don't really worry about you know paying the taxes because we like where the money is going and it's going to good places and it's building our society and making life better for everybody. And that is why we need the people like you, like me, who started a business to help people. We need those people to have money. We need them to have influence so that we can continue to build our society and keep making it better. And I think especially now, post-pandemic and going through economic shifts and political change around the world, it is more important than ever that entrepreneurs Get a seat at the table and keep growing things in the right direction. How do we get a seat at the table? By growing our business to the point where we don't have to be the one baking the cookies, running the classes anymore. If we take the best people in the world with the best intentions and give them money and influence and leadership training, wow, our world will continue to move forward. If we keep waiting for the politicians to get it right or the right union to go on strike or the stock market to magically fail, fix itself, we're just going to keep going backward. And so more than ever, it is crazy important that the best leaders in the world with the best intentions become the leaders of the world and create other leaders to carry on the legacy from them. That might sound a little grandiose. Maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but there's no better person than you and me to have money and influence and control of our destiny. That's why I want you to ascend. Yes, I want you to be successful. Yes, I want your gym to stick around to change the health and fitness of the people who come there and ultimately your community. Yes, I want you to create great jobs for other people. Yes, I want your kids to get Taylor Swift tickets or whatever they want. Yes, I want your kids to go to school. Yes, I want you to be able to retire. But more than anything, I want you to actually activate the potential impact that you can have on this world. It is enormous and it is real. We can do a lot of good in our lives. We can change the lives of thousands of people through something as simple as creating a micro gym. We can create meaningful careers that people love. We can change the lives of our family and our neighbor and our community. Now it's time to change the world. That's not just rhetoric. We can actually do it by empowering more entrepreneurs. The key is you have to progress as an entrepreneur stage by stage. You have to start in the founder phase. You have to hustle and grind, right? That romantic notion that everybody thinks entrepreneurs entrepreneurs love, and we do love for a little while, but eventually kills us. You have to go through the farmer phase. You need to learn how to lead your staff. You need to learn how to leverage people to get the result that you want and build a successful gym. You have to work through the tinker phase. You have to plan for the future. You have to set wealth aside so that you can weather the storms that are going to come and provide for your kids in the future and create a legacy. And then eventually, I hope that you'll move up to chief phase and produce other leaders who will do as much good as you're doing out there right now. I'm Chris Cooper. This is run a profitable gym. And look, I'm losing my voice. I get very passionate about this topic. If you want to talk to me and my team, just go to gymownersunited.com. You can send me a DM on Facebook to talk more about this stuff. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about leadership and how our leadership has to evolve as our business evolves through these four phases.