Fix the Owner, Fix the Business: Leadership Skills for Gym Growth

What’s stopping your gym from growing?

In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," Chris Cooper explains how gym owners accidentally limit their business growth and presents a four-level framework for leadership mastery.

The progression moves from self-leadership (controlling your focus and energy) to team leadership (getting staff aligned without micromanaging), peer leadership (influencing equals without authority) and community leadership (expanding impact beyond your gym).

The key insight: Before you can lead others effectively, you must first master yourself.

Fix the owner, fix the business.

Links

Gym Owners United

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1:57 - Self-leadership

6:45 - Team leadership

10:30 - Peer leadership

14:23 - Community leadership

18:31 - How to grow as a leader

Transcript

Chris: 0:00

What's stopping your gym from growing? I know what's stopping mine. Hi, it's me. I'm the problem. It's me. Actually, I'm Chris Cooper, and I don't usually open this show with a quote from Taylor Swift, but I thought it was pretty appropriate. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and I want to talk to you about fixing the owner to fix the business. In my last episode, I talked about the four phases of entrepreneurship, founder, farmer, tinker, and chief. and how your business has to evolve through those four phases. No matter how long it takes you, it could take you four years, it could take you 40 years. Some people never get there. But what actually stops the business, what places a ceiling effect and limits your growth is you. And if we can fix the owner of your gym, we can probably fix the business. Today, that's what I'm going to talk about. The four levels of leadership and how we have to evolve as leaders so that we stop being the roadblock, the linchpin, the thing that stops our gym from growing. Every day, I talk to gym owners in the Two Brain Mentorship Program and those who aren't in the program yet. And they'll often tell me what's stopping their gym from growing. But the number one barrier to your gym's growth is not the market. It's not the clients. It's not the competition. It's not your staff. It's you. It's the owner. And so today, we'll walk through the different levels of leadership, the mistakes that I've made at each one, or at least one example because there's a hundred at each, and how you can fix them to unlock growth. We're First, I want to talk about why leadership matters at every phase of your business. Your business grows from founder phase to farmer phase to tinker phase to chief. And every transition requires a new level of leadership skills. If you stay the same, your gym is going to get stuck. I've blown it thousands of times. Don't worry. I'm going to share some of those stories with you. But before you can lead others, you need to lead yourself. So we're going to start with the base of the leadership pyramid, which is self-leadership. This is your ability to control your own focus, to control your energy, control your mindset. There are some tools that you can use to help you. And I want to start off with just asking some questions so that you know where you need help with self-leadership. We all do. First, can you dedicate one hour a day to working on your business and nothing else with full focus? Can you stay calm before you have hard conversations? Can you bring energy to your group classes and your personal training clients, even when you're stressed and distracted about money or something else? Can you think long-term instead of just, how am I going to pay that bill next week? Can you overcome the scarcity mindset when you see a new gym opening up on the next block? Can you confidently recommend what a client actually needs or are you projecting your own financial fears onto them? I've got so many stories about all of these and I've documented lots of them in my book, but there are so many that I'll try share a few with you right now. First, lack of focus. I ruminate on things. If I don't get it out of my head, it stays there. And so, you know, many times, especially in the early stages of my career, I would be thinking about a client that owed me money or a staff person that showed up late or out of uniform while I was training a client. And I would think that I was covering it up, but the client would know, like he's preoccupied about something. And I would be mad. And I couldn't wait for the session to end so that I could go over and say, that email or check that math or look at the bank balance or like confront that staff person, right? Are you able to block that out? Are you able to come to the calmness? Or maybe sometimes it's curiosity for me too, right? Like you hear this rumor, hey, I heard there's another gym opening up. Anyway, how about those Blue Jays? You know, and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm fixated on what you just said. Are you able to give your full attention to your client? These are some of the skills of self-leadership that no Don't just naturally happen. You have to cultivate them. You have to practice them. You have to reflect on how you did, and you have to keep trying to do better. It's not enough to read a leadership book and, you know, okay, I should eat the frog and do the hardest thing every morning first, and I should make my bed so that I start the day off right, and I should start with why. I should know why I'm doing this. That's all great in theory, but the reality is that if you're not able to overcome distraction and rumination, you will never last as an entrepreneur. You actually have to change yourself, not just learn more about leadership. And part of self-leadership is the ability to focus. Another part is showing up with energy. Do you show up to your gym drained and hurting the client experience? I can remember one of my clients going to visit another gym and the owner showed up late. They were at 6.05 and his hood was up. He made no eye contact with anybody in the parking lot. He unlocked the door, flipped on the lights, and started writing the the warmup on the whiteboard and then just disappeared into the back. And my client was like, when do his class start? And the other people were like, oh, just do the warmup that's on the board. He'll be back in a minute, you know? And it's easy to say like, oh, that's just a bad gym owner. But the reality is there's a reason that that gym owner behaved that way. They didn't start out that way. They got to that point because they were drugged down. Are you exhausted or are you energized? You know, yes, you can fake it till you make it for a to take time off and refresh yourself on the weekends, are you dialed with nutrition? Are you dialed with your own workouts? Or are you burned out and exhausted? Like, are you doing the best thing to put the best foot forward for your clients? Or are you training so hard that you ignore them, right? I've got lots of stories about coaches training really hard for themselves and starting the client's class late or showing up to an NSI with no shirt on and still sweaty from their own workout. I mean, are you able to have the self-leadership to know I need to do what's best for the client here. Another great one is projecting your own budget onto your clients. Like, I need to give this guy a discount. They're a teacher. I know what teachers make. They can't afford this. Until you master self-leadership, every other level of leadership is totally shaky. Think about trying to coach a staff to do a better job when you're exhausted and you can't make eye contact. Think about giving a staff person an evaluation when you're preoccupied. That that's just not going to work. And while we always have to be working on self-leadership, you have to have that base set up before you can lead anybody else. Before you can turn the leadership focus around onto your staff, you have to be able to lead yourself. When you're able to focus, when you're able to control your emotions and show up and grow your business every day, then you can start improving your team leadership. And this is really about getting your staff aligned and effective. What does aligned and effective mean? It means That means you are hiring people to get your gym to an outcome, okay? That's what team leadership means. They're not robots. And that means that you have to use influence and you have to use empathy. You also have to use clarity and give them freedom within a framework, okay? So let me ask you these questions to assess your team leadership skills. First, have you clearly explained what you want? Is it written down somewhere outside your head? Do your staff understand the business's goals and why it needs to be profitable? shy about talking about that. Do your staff have step-by-step playbooks? Do they know when they're being evaluated and how often and when the next evaluation comes up? Do you know what they want from you? Have you asked them why they're doing this job or what they want from it? Okay. I have made bad hires out of desperation. I have assumed staff could read my mind and I would say like, why don't they clean up when they leave? That's common sense. God, these boomers, you know, but the reality is that clean the gym was in my mind and they can't read my mind. The biggest one, oh, this is brutal. I would never evaluate their performance until they did something wrong. And so if they got an email from me saying, hey, we need to sit down and do evaluation, they knew they'd screwed up. And so, you know, two days from now, we're going to have an evaluation. They would stress for two days. I would stress for two days. And I was so afraid of what I saw as confrontation that I would literally get sick before I would sit down and do a staff evaluation. The cure, what I should have done, was booked staff evaluations every single quarter in advance on specific dates so that when I was going into it, I would have good things to talk about and things to improve on. Instead of, I'm doing this because I'm mad. Now I'm emotional. They're defensive. I've got to break bad news, which I hate doing. It's a confrontation. They're going to argue back because they're all amped up and so am I. It just goes poorly. So good staff leadership means having the discipline to do the things in advance and then doing them well. So you deliver the evaluation, you take a minute, reflect on it. How did that go? You try and do better the next time and you reflect on it again. This is the cycle of building leadership skills. You try something, you reflect on it, you know, use a mentor or use your metrics if you want to be objective, and then you try to do it a little bit better. That's how you build. You don't just read one book, some Simon Sinek thing and become a better leader. That doesn't happen. You have to try things reflect on them to improve them, and then do a little bit better the next time. The key to team leadership is understanding that you're not hiring mini-me's. You're not hiring robots. It's about clarity, systems, and consistent feedback. It's not even really about empathy because a lot of people will give, give, give to their staff thinking that that will motivate them, and that's not the case. What your staff want and crave and have been trained for since the age of three is freedom and responsibility within a framework. The reason that your staff are used to frameworks is because the school bell sounded at 9 a.m., and then at exactly 12 they got lunch, and at exactly 1 they were back in the classroom, and they got recess at 2.15 when the bell rang, and at 3 o'clock they left. We've been trained since almost infancy to live within a system. They love the part of school that let them feel creative, but they were still living within that system, the framework. If you set the framework, they can be creative within that framework, and that is the best way to create a healthy and happy relationship with your staff. The third level of leadership is peer leadership. Now your staff kind of have to listen to what you say. You can get away with it quite a bit because you're paying them and they'll lose their job if they don't. But influencing your peers is harder because they don't have to listen to you. The best example I have for this is the Two Brain mentor team. There are 55 mentors on the team. They are not winging it. They're not just people who've had one fluky gym model. These are people who have risen through Two Brain. They have very successful gyms, they are wealthy themselves, and they've decided that their act of public service is to mentor other gym owners. Yes, they're paid for it. Yes, I'm paid for it. Yes, the client is paying for it, the gym owner. And that's all part of what makes it successful. It's that accountability cycle, right? The thing is that even though gym owners pay the mentor for guidance and the return on mentorship is insane, it's like unmeasurable over time, sometimes they don't do And so the mentors have to have peer leadership skills. They have to learn how to influence people, encourage people, hold people accountable, break problems down into tiny steps and check in and make sure that people are getting that done. That's an enormous skill. If you are able to actually create change without having the leverage of you're fired or the leverage of fear or the leverage of control, like you're grounded, that's enormous. And that, learning peer leadership, is how you influence your entire town to exercise. It's how you influence your political leadership to do better. It's how you influence all the other business owners in town to band together and give to charity. Peer leadership is taken for granted. We think that people are just born with a natural charisma. It's not. It's learned, at least in my case. And if I can learn to influence other people, other gym owners, you can learn to influence anybody, trust me. Peer leadership is the third tier of leadership. Not everybody gets there, but I think everybody should try to. So back to the mentor example, these mentors are not just making it up as they go along. They have the two brain program and they're coached on delivering the two brain program. We know that anybody that follows the two brain program is going to build a bigger, more successful gym. It's proven itself thousands of times. What it comes down to is the implementation and the mentors are trained to help the gym owner implement it and make sure that they do Okay. The program is great, but just like in your gym, if the programming is amazing and the coaches can't get people to follow it, it's not going to work. It's not going to save the client's life. I have a horrible example of this one. So I was coaching a client, you know, and I would kind of call this peer leadership because this person was an entrepreneur and they were giving me as much entrepreneurial advice as I was giving them coaching. Let's face it. I probably should have been paying them. And, you know, so I consider them kind of a peer And I was coaching them and she was like, oh, Chris, I just, I can't get these workouts done. Like the only time I work out all week is when I've got this appointment with you. I know you give me homework and stuff, but I just can't get it done. And I was distracted by something else. I was thinking about something completely different. And I said, well, that's not my job. I can't force you to do it. She left and she never came back. She still had like seven or eight personal training appointments prepaid. I never heard from her again. That's bad peer leadership. What we have to do is think about like, what is the best thing for my peers? And if it aligns with the best thing for you or your cause or your mission, then align together, influence them to join you. And together, you're far more powerful than the two of you separately can be. That's what peer leadership is all about. Peer leadership is about coaching. It's guiding your equals to better outcomes without, you know, authority cracking the whip. The fourth level of leadership is what I would call community leadership. This is where you're leading beyond your gym and into your community and even society. Entrepreneurs are the foundation of the economy. And without our economy, without our wealth, we wouldn't have things like democracy. We wouldn't have freedom of speech. We wouldn't have freedom of enterprise and all those other things that we take for granted. We wouldn't have the money to pay for healthcare. We wouldn't have the jobs, right? We wouldn't have wealth. We wouldn't have incentives built into our system for other people to create other jobs. We wouldn't have money left over to help people. Politicians spend money on Entrepreneurs generate money. And when you're successful as a leader, you have a responsibility to strengthen the system that enabled you to start. And so that means, you know, at this level of leadership, you're joining boards, not for status, but to have impact. You are trying to, if you're a CrossFit gym, you're trying to influence CrossFit HQ because it's your duty to save the movement, right? You've probably seen posts from me about here's what CrossFit needs to do. I'm not doing that for status, right? I don't really care what CrossFit HQ thinks about me. I'll be honest. What I care about is saving CrossFit for the affiliates and making this better for everybody who wants to do CrossFit and making sure there is a CrossFit in the future. And I've been doing this with the rest of the fitness industry now for 30 years, pointing out where there's rot or corruption or sleaze in the industry, trying to fix that for the entire industry. When I was a brand new leader and a no authority, no voice, no influence. Nobody would listen. Now that I'm at a level where we have 1,000 gym owners in Two Brain at any given time, we have 2,000 alumni, Gym Owners United, our free group has 10,000 gym owners in it, and I've got a bit of a platform, it's my duty to use that platform to make the industry better. It's your duty as a personal trainer, a CrossFit coach, a F45 owner, a franchisee, an affiliate, whatever It's your duty to become successful enough that you have the time, bandwidth, and influence to change the industry for good. Look, when I started in fitness, it was 1996. I've been doing this for almost 30 years. Most of fitness was a way for personal trainers to meet women or men. A lot of fitness turned into like prostitution, craziness. There was a lot of corruption and overwhelm. People were selling packages and then just like disappearing. Gyms were... opening up, taking in a million dollars in prepaid membership revenue, and then never opening their doors again. The industry was filthy. And now that I have a platform, I'm doing everything I can to fix it, including CrossFit, but also including these franchises that are just opening up, taking people's money, and then never supporting them again, including the governing bodies who are just certifying people with like a 10-word test, right? Including people who are giving advice that they shouldn't be giving including even other business coaches who are not even looking at data like they're speaking from no authority at all it's my duty at this level as uncomfortable as it makes me to speak up about these things and try to make a better fitness industry for everybody because if the fitness industry is better then the fitness of the world will be better community leadership is the highest expression of your entrepreneurial journey and i hope you get that far when you do it will be your duty to speak up you know another great example one of the mentors on the Two Brighton team is Joanne Kogel. Joanne is a successful gym owner. She's a fantastic mentor. She's a good peer leader. And she's in politics. She's running for the mayor of her city because she sees it as her duty as a successful entrepreneur to protect the rights of the entrepreneurs so that she can protect the foundation of our democracy. And this is the level that I hope all of you reach. We need the best people reaching the highest levels if we want to continue to have a better, more progressive healthier society. Look, it doesn't matter what level of leader you're at right now. I firmly believe that everybody can make it to the highest levels of leadership. I don't say that I'm the best leader in the world. I do have an opportunity to live kind of at that top chief level, you know, the community leadership level. But I'm also working on my self-leadership every single day. I also have holes to fix on my team leadership, a thousand percent. Ask anybody on my team. I also can get a lot better at influencing my peers. You know, why are my parents not working out? I need to get better at that. You need to start by asking yourself, what level is holding you back right now? What's stopping your business growth and starting there? Don't try to improve every single level at once. You probably need some self-leadership. If you want to talk more about this, you can book a call with my team to identify where your leadership gap is and how Two Brain can help. My new book, Chief, is going to be coming out at the end of 2025, probably early 2026. And that book is not just more information about eating the frog and making your bed and starting with why. That book is an activity and it's a guided path from self-leadership to team leadership to peer leadership to community leadership. It's my best attempt so far to try and make our entire world better for the fitness coaches, the gym owners, their families, and everybody else in it. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. Thank you for your service so far and here's to the future.