Is Your Gym Business Healthy? Use This 6-Metric Report Card to Find Out

Gym growth is simple when you understand the only six metrics that really matter in fitness businesses.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper breaks them down so you can improve your gym:

• Average revenue per member (ARM)
• Length of engagement (LEG)
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Effective hourly rate (EHR)
• Net owner benefit (NOB)
• Client headcount

Using data from over 15,000 gym owners who contributed to Two-Brain’s 2024 “State of the Industry” guide, Coop presents the industry averages for each metric so entrepreneurs know exactly where they stand in comparison.

Then, he equips gym owners with specific tactics to improve each metric and explains why many gyms actually don’t need more members to generate additional revenue.

Plus, Coop dives deep into marketing with Two-Brain’s four-funnel system: referrals, content, social media and paid ads.

He even shares an exclusive preview of the clients-only worksheet Two-Brain gym owners use to audit marketing performance, and he provides actionable fixes for each funnel.

Tune in to learn how to track and improve the critical numbers in your gym business.

Want Coop’s $100K checklist? Head to Gym Owners United using the link below and send him a DM.

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2:14 - Average revenue per member (ARM)

8:23 - Length of engagement (LEG)

14:33 - Return on investment (ROI)

21:48 - Effective hourly rate (EHR)

27:14 - Net owner benefit (NOB)

32:47 - Client headcount

37:13 - Four marketing funnels

45:13 - Auditing and fixing your funnels

59:34 - Getting more leads

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I love meeting gym owners, even online. And the conversation always starts with, how's your gym doing? And quite often I get back, well, pretty good, as if the person has to think about it and they're not actually sure. They're just telling me how they feel in their gut. Today, I'm going to give you a way to actually answer that question. And even better, I'm going to tell you how to improve it. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to help you audit your gym. I'm going to give you a report card, and I'm going to walk through the six key metrics that we measure in Two Brain, the only six metrics that you need to grow your gym. Then I'm going to help you establish where you are, what's a C grade with each metric, and I'm going to tell you how to get an A. We're going to be walking through the different metrics, average revenue per member per month, length of engagement, how long you keep people ROI, what you're getting back from all of the expenses that you're paying, like what's your return on the rent, etc., your effective hourly rate, how are you using your time effectively to grow your gym, net owner benefit, how much you're getting paid compared to the average gym owner. And then of course, clients, how to get more clients. And in part two of this podcast, I'm actually going to dive super duper deep into getting more clients because I really want to help you with that. And I really want you to understand how exactly to get more clients. Now we're going to be borrowing some numbers from the Two Brain State of the Industry Guide. This is the largest data set in the fitness industry so that you know we're starting from truth and we know what a C grade is. I'm also going to be pulling some tactics from the Two Brain Business Mentorship Program. Now, I'm happy to share this stuff with you for free. And of course, our mentorship program exists to help coach you through it. So to help you actually implement it, do the work and get the results from it too. All right. So the first thing we want to do is we want to establish how you're actually doing compared to the average, because we're all a bunch of islands out there. We're all alone. And so when we ask ourselves, how's my Jim actually doing? We really have no idea. We're kind of guessing, right? Am I above average, below average? I'm doing better than I used to. I'm doing worse than I used to. But how is that really in comparison to everybody else? So we're going to start with ARM. This is average revenue per member per month. And this is a measure of your perceived value to your client. You're in the value exchange business and people pay you what they think you're worth. And so we want to make sure that you're making a good income and charging the right amount and making the right amount per client. How much should you be making? Well, the average across 15,000 gyms, by the way, for large group gyms, so these would be bootcamp type gyms and it'd be CrossFit type gyms, gyms that are just selling mostly group classes or the majority of the revenues coming from group classes, their average ARM is$167.76 per member per month. Gyms that are running a small group type program, so four to six people working out together, their ARM is going to be higher. So that's$230.18 per month. And groups running one-on-one training, the average is$353.37 per month. Now, if you really want to see all these metrics laid out, you can look at our 2024 State of the Industry Guide. This is on page 19 of that guide. And the new metrics are coming out in our 2025 State of the Industry guide. But I'm using these metrics because we want to start from truth. We don't want to start from what the person down the street is telling you, what somebody in a Facebook group is telling you, what you think is true. We want to start from truth. So these are what it takes to get a C.$167.76 if you're running a group training program like a CrossFit gym.$230.18 if you're running a small group gym, which could also be a CrossFit gym, but is more than likely like a semi-private type gym.$353.37 if you're running a one-on-one personal training studio. This is per member per month. Are you higher or lower than that? Now, we're going to talk about how to actually improve this because I want you to go from a C to an A. That's what it takes to make a great living in this industry. To improve your ARM, there are three things that you can do. And I'm going to share these things from easiest to hardest. So the first way to improve your ARM is just simply to offer an on-ramp program. Look, especially if you're running a group training gym, you need to onboard people properly. An on-ramp program doesn't just solve your ARM problem or improve your ARM at least. It also solves your retention problem because people aren't just getting thrown into a free trial class where they don't fit. They don't know what they're doing. They feel dumb and they're worried they might throw up in front of people. Okay. Jumping into a large group class the first time, that was cool for you and me, the gym owner. It's not cool for most of our clients. And so an on-ramp program is amazing value for them because it onboards them to fitness without throwing them into too much too soon. It teaches them the movements so that they never feel lost or dumb in your class. And it improves retention because a slow onboarding means that they're gradually introduced to your program and the people in your gym. If you're running a small group training program, you should still have an on-ramp program. If you're doing one-on-one, the best way to increase your ARM is not going to be through an on-ramp. It's just adding other things to your basic program like recommendations and automations. But for most people, you can improve your ARM right away by adding an The second thing that you want to do to improve your ARM is adding specialty programs just for people who want them. Now, years ago, when I would talk to people who are running bootcamp programs, kettlebell programs, CrossFit programs, whatever, they would sell this kind of like unlimited membership. And so on Tuesday, they would have their strength class. And on Thursday, they would have their cardio class. And on Saturdays, they would have weightlifting or something. And they'd have kids in there too. And the problem was that they were coaching the different facets of fitness separately. And so people who didn't want that strength class really had no class to go to at seven o'clock on a Thursday night. And they would say like, why am I paying for this? I don't want it. Instead, what you should do is look at your clients, talk to them in the goal review session, look at their results because you're tracking their results anyway, and say, where are they weakest? And then run a specialty group once a quarter for that. The other thing that you can do is test out additional revenue streams by running a one-time specialty group first. So if example, maybe you want to work more with people over 60 and you start a legends program. Well, you're not just going to commit permanently to a specific time until you figure out what's best and whether this is even going to fly. And so you run a six week legends program for the parents and friends of your parents, of the people in your gym. And you see like, can I fill this? Do people love it? Will it fill again? You do a bullet before a cannonball. The one that I like to do is a healthy habits or a golden habits challenge, which is a nutrition challenge lasting 30 30 days. And we do this once a quarter. We also have a legends program that runs monthly and we do that once a quarter. And then, you know, the other program that we'll run is usually something that's sports specific. So, you know, what sport is in its off season right now. And then we just have those three specialty programs and we repeat them over and over four times a year. Okay. So the first way to increase your ARM is to add on it. The second way is to look at your clients and offer specialty groups. The third way is a hard one. And that is increase your pricing. Look, if you're running a group class program, I can almost guarantee that you're on You probably set your rate based on the wrong metrics, which is like what the dude down the street is charging or what you think you could afford or like five bucks cheaper than something else or what somebody on a message board said. Okay, Facebook, whatever. You can probably stand to increase your rates. You can go up to 15% without much churn. Our data shows like 15% is kind of where you have to be a little bit more careful. And those revenue dollars fall straight to your bottom line. There's no other costs associated with it. If you add an on-ramp, that's really, really easy. You're going to have to pay a coach to deliver it eventually. If you add a specialty program, that's really, really easy, but you're going to have to pay another coach a percentage of that revenue. If you just increase your rates, which is hard, all that will drop straight to the bottom line. You can use it however you want. So those are three ways to increase your average revenue per member. The next metric I want to talk about is length of engagement. Look, if you're not keeping people for two years, you're not changing their lives. They are not developing the habits that will actually help them long-term. Now, in a personal training gym, the length of engagement, how long the average person stays is pretty long, generally over three years. People who sign up know what they're getting into, they know what the price is, and they stick around for a long time. If you have somebody in your gym who's been there 12 years, I can almost guarantee that you have a one-on-one relationship with them. Either they started in personal training, they started when you were tiny, or they They've been doing personal training this whole time. I have clients who've been with me over a decade. They're all personal training clients. But for group training, it's different. Now, the industry average is about 18 months in the US. That's enormous. And that's because we've been telling people, hey, you got to be working with smaller groups. You got to be coaching like four to six people or maybe up to like seven, and then it drops off. What's interesting is that when... people start reducing the number of classes because they get rid of the classes with two or three people in them. They get these groups of like seven or eight people, which is kind of peak retention level. So if you want to increase your length of engagement, keep people longer, actually change their lives, then here's what you're going to do. The first thing that you're going to do is look at like, what is the barrier to retention? What's flushing people out? So you want to break down when people are leaving. And if you don't know, if your gym membership software or whatever doesn't tell you, then build these things in order. First is add an on-ramp. And again, on-ramp is not a barrier to entry. It's a barrier to exit. By properly preparing people for the next step for them, be that group classes or one-on-one or small group, semi-private, whatever, you are setting them up for long-term success. You're not just like throwing them in with the wolves. And this might sound weird to you. If you've been pursuing fitness for a long time and then you opened up a gym, you can jump in and just try things. But that is not most people. You and I are not the same as our average client. Sorry. So the first thing to improve your leg is to add an on-ramp. If you've already got an on-ramp, the next step is to clearly map out the first 90 days of a client's journey in your gym. So you want to go day by day. You want to build these in phases. So at first, your job is just like get them in the gym, affirm their purchase by giving them warm welcomes by a Introducing them to people by sending them texts, telling them what to do, what to wear, what to eat, how to stretch in between sessions, setting up automated texts, having an onboarding session where they meet you one-on-one, introducing them to other people, right? Like affirm their purchase. Then the next thing that you want to do is like map the next step. So you want to acclimate them. So you want to teach them the basic movements. You want to praise them. Hey, you're doing it right. You'd lifted 95 pounds your first try. Amazing. Whatever, right? And then from there, you just keep building out the 90-day sequence. You take it day by day and you say like, if I had the most nervous person in the world with no fitness experience, what would I say to them if they were my only client? What would I tell them that day? And you can, of course, build this out with your gym management software so that you're sending them automated texts, or you're actually picking up the phone, or you're sending them an email, whatever that is. You should be talking to them every day. At the end of the 90 days, you want to meet up with them. And I'll give you a top tip here. This is not intuitive, but But if you ask them for a referral at the 90-day mark and they actually say, you know, my husband should join, that is a huge game changer for retention. And I won't get into the psychology of this, but think about it. If you took a friend to a restaurant that you loved, you would spend the entire meal convincing them how great the restaurant is, right? Isn't that so cool? Did you notice what the waiter just did there? You're invested in the success of the gym. And let's face it, if you really want to change a client's life you got to change the lives of the people around them, or they are going to be fighting an uphill battle. So bringing in their peers is really like the best way to keep them long-term. Okay. So the second thing that you can do is map out the client's first 90 days. The third thing that you can do is set up a goal review with them every 90 days for at least their first year. And every six months after that, at this goal review, you have them come in, you measure their progress. Okay. You If they are interested in the level method, if you're using the level method, measure their progress there. If they're interested in getting stronger, measure their strength. If they're interested in losing weight, measure their body fat. Measure the thing that they care about. Then ask them, are you completely satisfied with your results? And if they say, yes, I am, then you say, we're so proud of you. Would you share your story with somebody who might need to hear it? Then you ask them for a referral. If they say, I'm happy with my results, but I'm not like super jacked about it. They're telling you they want to speed it up. And so you make a new prescription. Okay. If I were in your shoes, here's what I would do. And if they say, actually, I'm not really that happy with my results, they're giving you an opportunity to sell them again, instead of just quitting and trying something else out on their own. And so at that point, you need to make a new prescription. Okay. If I was looking to do something differently than what you're currently doing, here's what I would recommend. Usually this only happens if you are about making the right prescription in the first place. Maybe you thought, ah, that person can't afford personal training or nutrition coaching or whatever. And you recommended group training or like your budget option for them when that's not really what they needed. And now they're not getting the results that they should have. Now's your big opportunity and like the last chance to get over your internal BS, tell them what they actually need and get them on the right program. That's how you improve length of engagement. Add an on-ramp, map out the first 90 days, set up goal reviews every three months for the first year and every six months after that. The next metric is ROI. So every purchase that you make, like this is my gym, by the way, behind me, every purchase that you make, you make for a reason. You are making an investment in that purchase. When I bought this rig that you see here over my shoulder, I was making an investment by buying the rig so that I could train people and I would get a return on that investment forever. When I rented this space first, 6,500 or square feet. I did that with the knowledge that I needed about 6,000 square feet to run a big group class, to run one program in one wing and a personal training program in the other wing of the building and have a good sales office and a nice lobby. I knew exactly what I wanted before I found this space. But every dollar that you spend that doesn't go to you or to taxes is an investment. And that includes your staff. Your staff are the biggest investment that you will make. So how do we improve our return on investment? Well, First, your staff expenses average across the industry is about 33% of your gross revenue. So every dollar that comes in, 33 cents goes out to your staff. Your fixed expenses is about 47% of your gross revenue, okay? Now, if you're looking at the state of the industry guide from 2024, this is on page 30. I break it all down. Yes, 47 and 33 add up to 80%. That means that for most gyms, eight tenths of every dollar, 80 cents of every dollar that comes into your gym It goes right back out again. That goes out to your staff. It goes out to your landlord. It goes out to the internet company. It goes out to the bank that's holding your lease on your equipment or your loan on your equipment, right? That means that gyms are not that profitable yet. But one of the fastest ways to get more profitable is to get a better return on your expenses. So are you higher or lower than that? Are you paying your staff more than 33% of your gross revenue? Are you paying the landlord and your bills more than 47% of your gross revenue? If you are, then you're getting less than a C. If you're at 33% for your staff and 47% for your landlord, you're getting a C. Let's improve that. So the first thing you want to do is don't make any cuts. The first thing you want to do is pull out your P&L or your bank statement, wherever you have a list of all the money that's going out every month. You're going to just take a highlighter like this, and you say, where is that going out? This is called an expense audit. And again, we're not making any cuts. All we're trying to do is to get a better return on our investments. So the first thing you do is you say like, okay, well, this expense went to the bookkeeper. This expense went to the tax person or whatever. This expense went to the landlord. All you got to do is break them down first. Then you're going to look at each one and say, how can I get a better return? Before you cut anything, you try to improve the return you get on that investment. There's a reason you signed up with that bookkeeper. but there's a reason you're using that gym management software, let's try to get back to that reason first. So let's say it's your bookkeeper. You call them up and you say, hey, I'm just going through my expenses here. How can I get a better return on the time that we spend together? Now, this isn't offensive, right? You're actually giving them the opportunity to sell you on their service, just like we did with that goal review earlier. You're helping them. So the bookkeeper might say, well, Chris, if you gave me just all your receipts every month, I could get your books done a little bit faster. Don't worry, I can include that in the fee. And then you can do the exact same thing with your software. Hey, how can I get a better return on my investment? Now, this doesn't mean that you're going to necessarily save money. They might actually tell you, hey, Chris, you're paying for Zen Planner, you're paying for Beyond the Whiteboard, you're paying for GLM all separately. If you put all this together into Kilo, then you would save about$300 a month. Boom. Guess where that$300 goes straight to me, straight to the bottom line, right? This is the beautiful part about combining expenses or getting a better ROI is it's immediately profitable. It makes you more profitable right away. So the first thing we're going to do is this expense audit. We're going to try and get a better ROI. The second thing that we're going to do is we're actually going to cut some stuff. We're going to say like, do I need that? Now, look, we've all been brought up probably in a household where you got to scrimp and save and you You want to bootstrap everything. You want to pay off debt quickly. But here's the thing. This can actually put a chokehold on you, right? It can choke you out. It can starve you by cutting off your cashflow. There was a time back early, like 2007, when I was being as aggressive as I could paying off my shareholder loan. And I was paying my staff like the top level that I possibly could. And also I was letting my clients pay at the end of the month instead of paying in advance. That was crazy. And I was just running out of cash, even though my my clients owed me like$12,000, I wasn't paying my bills. And so I called the bank and I said, what can I do here? And they said, oh, let's just consolidate a couple of your loans, stretch the payments out over five years instead of three, bring down your monthly payments, protect your cashflow while you're fixing this other stuff. So yes, I refinanced things, but I kept the loans open so that after I got some breathing room and got my feet back under me, I could actually speed up and I paid off my loans way faster than I would have. But it also saved me mentally because I was no longer worried about like, am I going to be able to pay my staff this week? I bought that mental bandwidth. So the second step that you want to do is actually cut things and fix your cashflow problem by extending your loan out if you need to, while you're fixing the big things. The third thing that you can do is you can cut some of your expenses by renting them to somebody else. So subleasing your space is the perfect example here. A lot of people, they get into this and they rent more space than they need thinking that they're going to grow into it, right? Or they buy more equipment than they need thinking that like, this is going to give me a competitive edge. It's not. And you quickly realize that when all of your money comes in and goes right back out to the landlord again. What do you do with that? Well, you sublease some of your space, right? You audit. You say like, hey, when I opened up, I thought it would be cool to have like a coach's hangout room, but 400 square feet, you know, that comes out to like 300 bucks a month in rent. And all I've got is this dirty, smelly room that I can't use? What if I rented that out to a massage therapist and just charge them rent? Like I'm not going to hire the massage therapist and worry about running their business. I'm just going to lease that out. Or what if I converted this unused space into personal training so that I could start selling that personal training space? Or what if I took that coach's locker room that's just trashed all the time and I turned that into a nice sales office? That's how I can get a better ROI on my expenses. So the first thing that you do is you do an expense audit You ask your providers, how can I get a better ROI on your product? Easy. Most of them will just tell you. If they get offended, they're probably being defensive for a reason. You should switch. Second, what can you cut? Third, what can you offer to somebody else or change to get a better return on your investment? Okay. Next, effective hourly rate. Look, I want you to earn more than your coaches. I mean, you took this financial risk, right? Everything's on the line for you. You're the one that the bank is going to come to if you're not paying your loan. But here's the thing. The average owner in a group training gym worldwide is only making$25 an hour. That's less than the average coach is. The owner is making less than their coach, right? Top gyms are making about$46 an hour. That's great. But let's just break this number down here. If you're making about 25 bucks an hour from your gym as the owner, you would make more money getting a job coaching somewhere else. What that means is that you're focusing too much on low value roles. You're focused way too much on coaching or cleaning or doing admin, and you're not focused enough on the CEO roles. Okay. So here's how to change that. First, if you're making less than 25 bucks an hour from your gym, and you just got to do a quick calculation here, count up the hours you spent in your gym and divide that by how much you made from your gym last month. If that works out to less than 25 bucks an hour, you got to make a quick change. All right. The first thing that you do is you make an appointment with the CEO. That's you. So every day you're going to block one hour off where you work on something that's going to grow the gym. Look, most gym owners are super busy. They tell me they don't have any more time in the day, but when they make this appointment with themselves, suddenly they've got time to do this work. The real reason that you're not spending an hour a day growing your gym is probably because you don't know what to do. And so you backfill all of your time with busy work. instead of doing what actually counts. We'll actually make you more money. We'll grow your gym. We'll get you more clients and boost up your effective hourly rate. So the first thing you do is you book this thing that we call the golden hour, an appointment with the CEO every day, one hour to do whatever it takes to grow your business. You're focused on marketing or sales in that hour. And that is about it. I wrote a whole book about this called the golden hour describing this strategy. But the number one thing that our gyms do to grow is they focus. They spend one one hour a day growing their gym, usually before they do anything else. For me, that is, I come down into my office, I sit down, I start the timer, and for one hour, I work on marketing. I don't open my email. I don't open my social media. I don't let myself get distracted. I do one thing to grow my gym before I do anything else. That is the easiest thing that you can do. It's the simplest anyway. The second thing that you can do to grow your EHR is to buy back your time. So what this probably means is that if you really are that busy and you're getting to your gym at 5 a.m. like I was and staying till 9, 9.30 at night like I was, and you're trying to just cram stuff in the gym, you got to buy back your time. So you make it an investment where you can get the most leverage. So for me, this was at first, and we're going back to 2009 now, hiring a cleaner. So the cleaner, his name was Sean. He would come in at nine at night. He would get paid about 14 bucks an hour back then. And while he was mopping, I would do marketing. I would write an email to my list about personal training. I would send an offer out to people. Back then it was too early for Facebook. So most of my marketing was email, but I would put something on the site, click here to buy now. I would make up my sales binder, that kind of thing, like high value CEO stuff. Then I realized, well, this is working. I'm paying Sean like 14 bucks an hour. The marketing is bringing me four or 500 bucks a week. Awesome. I should do this more. So the next thing I do is I hire the next biggest point of leverage, right? I hired somebody to run the 6am group. And when she came in, I would be in the gym and I would be doing more marketing or sales or booking no sweat intros or making my sales binder, refining my pitch. Even role-playing was making me more money than coaching that group was. And so you just climb this ladder from low value roles to slightly more expensive roles. Every time you do that, you buy back your time and you give yourself a promotion and work on higher value roles that make you more money. So the first thing that you can do obviously to improve your EHR is just spend more time in a focused state. The second thing that you can do is buy back your time. The third thing that you can do is actually cut down the amount of time that you're spending in the gym. Look, I know you have to do a two-hour workout every day. You have to be there at five. You have to look over the shoulder of your staff. You need to spend less time there. And that means you need to book some time off. You need to systemize everything thing that you're doing so that when you're not there, people are doing it exactly the way that you want it done. You need to evaluate your staff and give them feedback. There's a lot there, but the reality here is that if your coaches are making more than you, your gym is not going to survive. You need to be doing CEO work. EHR is a big red flag that somebody is not doing the work to grow their gym if they're doing everything else. If you're cleaning, you're not growing your gym. If you're coaching, you're not growing your gym. If you are doing the admin work and the bookkeeping, you are not growing your gym at that moment. Let a mentor tell you how to grow your gym. But the reality here is you need to be focused on that metric because it tells you how you're doing as a CEO. If you're making less than 25 bucks an hour, you're not getting a passing grade as a gym owner. The fifth section here is net owner benefit. And this is how much you're actually making from the gym. Look, none of us got into the gym business to make money. We got into the gym business to make a difference. But what will end your career is starvation. If you're not making money, you can't sustain your gym. There are thousands, tens of thousands of failed gym owners just in CrossFit alone, but also in boot camps, in various franchises. And they'll tell you that they quit the industry because they got burned out or they got stressed or there's too much competition or some other BS. The bottom line is that there wasn't enough money. If there was more money, they wouldn't have been as stressed. If there was more money, they would have hired the help to take a vacation. If there was more money, they wouldn't have worried about the competition, right? Money is the thing that drives you out of business. And that money is not how much revenue your gym is making. It's how much you take home. Eventually, you can't just be a martyr for your gym. Eventually, your wife and kids are going to look at you and be like, how are we paying the mortgage this month? Why can't we afford the good groceries? How come I'm going back to school in the dirty old shoes that I wore all summer? The reason that I know this is those things all happened to me. And I finally had to get my head right about money and realized that I wasn't a volunteer. I wasn't running a nonprofit and I needed to pay my family for this massive risk that they were taking with me. So here's the median. If you're running a group training gym, a bootcamp, a CrossFit, a kickboxing group class, whatever, right? The median monthly profit is$4,000. If you're making less than$4,000 a month take home from your gym, you're not even getting a C grade. Our top gyms are taking home over$20,000 a month. Don't worry about them right now. Like that's an A++. Worry about making more than 4,000 a month. Okay. So ask yourself though, are you higher or lower? Here's how to improve your net owner benefit. Number one, pay yourself first. This is the profit first strategy. John Briggs wrote an entire book about this just for microgyms. And basically what you want to do is prioritize your own income. This is so easy. All you've got to do in this age of automation is set yourself a monthly or a weekly paycheck that comes out of the business account and goes into your personal account. Now, depending on where you live in the world, you might be paying a different amount of taxes for commercially or personally. But if you're in the States, you're paying less personally in almost every state in your personal income taxes. You want to get the money out of your business and into your personal account as much as you can so that you're not just giving the difference to the government because that's how taxation works. You want to have a tax strategy, but you want to start by paying yourself first. Even if you're like in Canada or another country where the personal income taxes are higher than the corporate income taxes, you want to start making that decision to take more out of your business. You can reinvest it, but the business has to pay you. So start with the discipline. I used to write myself paper checks for three months in advance and take them to the bank and deposit them all at once so that I knew that that money was coming out and I didn't have to think about it. If you pay yourself with what's left over, there will never be money to pay yourself. If you pay yourself first, you will always find a way to pay all of your other bills. Mike Michalowicz has a great book on this called Profit First. So the first thing you want to do is just automate your pay. The second thing you want to do is automate your raises. So if you say, I can pay myself, I can just pay myself 50 bucks a week right now to start. Good. Automate that for the next three months. But then I want you to automate the following three months, 10 bucks higher, 60 bucks a week. If you're able to pay yourself a thousand a week right now. Great. Fantastic. That puts you just slightly above the median. That's good. The average gym owner should be making about a thousand bucks a week take home. If you're making that right now, wonderful. Schedule that out for the next month. But the following month, I want you to automate the raise. So you're not just going to automate the base pay forever. You're going to automate the raises. 5%, 10% is good. Keep doing that every quarter. Automate the raises. And finally, if you really I really want to increase your net owner benefit, increase your profitability, go through the other steps here, increase your ARM, increase your LEG, increase your revenue, decrease your expenses, work more on growing the business and less in like delivery and mopping. That's how you grow your profitability. And we have a whole stage of mentorship devoted to just this, because let's face it, you're the crash test dummy in your business. Until your business can pay you, it hasn't proven that it can pay anybody. You should not be to hiring anybody else full-time until your business can pay you. How much should it pay you? Well, it depends where you live, of course, but you want to set a perfect day goal. So in a perfect world, how much should the gym be paying you to cover all of your expenses with a bit left over? That is your net owner benefit target. It's based on your perfect day exercise. You'll go through this with your mentor. And of course, once you've got that target, now your business has proven that it can pay somebody a full-time meaningful wage. And you can start working on hiring somebody else. A lot of gym owners put everybody else first. They underprice because they're putting the client's budget first. They overpay their staff because they're putting the staff first. They're the last one to eat. And of course, they are the linchpin. And then the business fails and everybody's screwed, okay? That's how you improve your net owner benefit. The sixth metric is clients. And I saved this for last because this one deserves a deeper dive. Everybody I talk to thinks that getting more clients will solve all of these other problems. It won't. In fact, sometimes getting more clients makes things worse. It's like pouring gas into a broken engine. If you go faster, the engine will just break faster. And so I want to devote an entire podcast just to going through clients, okay? I'm going to start with this though, before I cut over to that other podcast. The average number of clients in a coaching gym is 122.5. The reason that a lot of gyms go bankrupt, and I shared a bunch of reasons earlier, but the number one reason is that they think they're going to get 200 clients, 300 clients. And based on that assumption, they underprice, they get too much space, they take a loan that's too big, they hire too many staff. Most gyms, and I mean more than 95% of gyms, get less than 150 members. But if you've got 150 of the right members, you'll charge them the right rate and they'll pay it. You'll keep them around long-term. You'll be able to make a good income for yourself and your family. You won't be cleaning up. You won't be like buying extra equipment, renting too much space. Your expenses will be in line and you'll be able to pay coaches full time. I want you to understand that the average gym is not getting 300 members, no matter how many discounts they give, no matter how low they price, because when they bring in the wrong people to try and get that head count up, those people turn out too quick. They underpay. And then you start losing staff because of the crazy turnover. Okay. So A C-grade is 122 clients. In the next podcast, I'm going to tell you how you can make an amazing living with 150 clients in your gym that you really like by getting the right clients. And I'm going to also tell you how to get those clients by building out four funnels and figuring out your marketing, getting a plan for your marketing together. I'm going to solve your marketing problem for you on this podcast. We're going to be using some metrics from the Two Brain Business State of the Industry Guide so that you can tell exactly how you're doing compared to everybody else. And I'm going to do something I don't normally do. I'm going to open up a tool that we actually use in Two Brain to help people audit their marketing funnels. I'm going to show that on my screen. Is it not something that we give away? I know you're used to me giving away just tons and tons of helpful worksheets and tools in gymownersunited.com. And while those things are helpful, they're not the same as what we use in Two Brain. In Two Brain, we go deeper, we go more specific. We work one-on-one with a mentor and you to help you determine and what's going to actually work in your gym. Two Brain is not just a program that you check boxes and follow, and it's the same for everybody. Two Brain is a mentorship program. And so we help you apply these to your gym, keeping your gym unique and not feeling like a franchise. Today, we're talking about marketing. In the last episode of the podcast, I talked about the other metrics in your business and the easiest ways to fix those. But today, we're going to talk about getting more leads. We're We're going to talk about getting those leads to actually buy. Okay. Now we're going to start this with a frame. We want to start with data. We want to start from truth. The average number of members that a coaching gym has is 122.5 clients. If you have our state of the industry guide from last year, you can look on page 15 and you'll see how that actually breaks down. This is really, really important because while there are gurus out there and marketing agencies telling you that you need to get 30 more clients or 50 more leads or 300 members in your gym, those don't actually bear out. It's not the truth. And that's not the strategy. In fact, if you start chasing that bone, you'll be chasing your tail in circles forever. And you'll be chasing the wrong metric because you'll do anything to get those 300 members in, including underpricing, including discounts, including over-promising and under-delivering. Worse, you might actually cut your own throat by renting too much space, buying too much equipment, over-hiring staff, running too many classes. Start from the assumption that you're going to have 120 to 150 really good members paying you the right rate, staying at least two years, and you will build a solid foundation on that. Okay? So let's audit your funnels from top to bottom. First, we want to talk about what marketing funnels are. Marketing funnels are the path from where somebody notices your business, your brand, or they find you, to inquiring, becoming interested, having a conversation with you, to showing up, to talking to you about it to actually signing up. That's what a funnel looks like. And there are more people up here than at the bottom because at different stages of your funnel, you lose people. And that's what we're going to try to help you prevent as much as we possibly can. So as promised, this is a sheet that we use inside 2Brain called the Fix Your Funnel Worksheet. And this is something that a mentor will go through with you one-on-one when you're in our mentorship program. So if you get lost here at any point, or you're not really sure what I'm talking about, or what is content, Coop, don't worry about it. Your mentor is going to work with you one-on-one through this when you're inside the Two Brain Program. We build four funnels. And by the way, the reason that we break these down into four separate things is because the way that you solve any problem in your business is by breaking it down into smaller and smaller and smaller problems. As problems get smaller, they get solvable. Small problems are solvable. Big problems, like I just need more clients, are not solvable. They're complicated, they're complex, and they're not actionable. You can't do them. When I break these down, That's the first step to solving them or making them better. You'll see what I mean as we go through this. So first, do you have a referral funnel? Meaning, are you just passively waiting? Like, I hope somebody brings in their partner. Or are you passively saying like, well, if I just make a great program, people will bring their friends. No, they won't. I'm going to tell you right now, a referral funnel is just as important, maybe more important than any of the other funnels I'm going to talk about, but you can't be passive. You have to be asking for referrals. You have to be helping your clients bring their friends in. Your clients are not marketers. No matter how much they love you, they are not going to wear a sign up and down the street and wave it around and come into this gym. It's great. If they're asked about your gym, they might say, oh, I love it. It's so great. But they're not going to make an appointment with their best friend and bring them in the gym with them. You have to do that. You have to do the marketing with them instead of waiting for them to do the marketing for you. So do you have a referral funnel like that? If you don't, don't tick this box. We're going to build one in a minute. Content funnel. Do you have a content funnel? Meaning, are you producing helpful things? Look, in the age where GPT is now taking over search, this is more important than ever because the robot is not going to be searching every possible article on the internet or following the same SEO play that you used when Google search was like the key. Especially now you have to have media. You have to have content. You have to have YouTube videos or at least a blog or maybe a podcast. Are you doing that? And does that podcast lead somewhere? Are you just publishing a podcast every week and hoping it starts discussions? Or does your podcast actually point you somewhere? I'm going to share right now. Here's my content funnel. I'm giving you this video. It's valuable. If you do what I tell you, you will make money. And then I want you to go to gymownersunited.com. That is our free group. There are 11,000 gym owners in that group. You will get more value by going to that group and you can chat with us about it. In that group, I'm going to give you more tools like this one that you see here, Fix Your Funnel, for free. I'm going to start a chat with you. I'm going to ask you how the gym is going. If I think that I can help you, I'm going to invite you to a call with my team to talk about mentorship and coaching. You should be doing that exact same thing in your community. Why? Because sales is the first act of coaching. You cannot wait for people to just come into your gym. You have to give them some useful information. You have to give them free knowledge and sell a coaching program at the end of that. Because honestly, everybody needs coaching. You need coaching in your business. I need coaching in my fitness. I also have business coaches. I have fitness coaches. I have nutrition coaches. You and I know this. Coaching is the shortcut to a better, healthier life. It speeds up the process. It gets us through the pain with less pain. It cuts through the clutter and gets us the result that we want, right? You sell coaching. I sell coaching. We need to start with content. And I've been telling people this since the dawn of time. CrossFit was a content company. If you're a CrossFit gym, you need to be making content. If you're not a CrossFit gym, you have an enormous opportunity because nobody else is making content in your town. The bots are out there looking for content. Your clients are out there using ChatGPT and different bots to find you. If you are publishing content right now, you will have a massive headstart over everybody else. Are you doing that? Yes or no? Check it off the list. Third, social media funnel. A lot of people post to social media sporadically and the funnel doesn't lead anywhere. Your social media funnel should pull people off of social media and into your waiting arms. So what you need to be doing, and I'll go through this point by point, don't worry. Your social media funnel has to pull people somewhere. It has to get them from Instagram, from TikTok, from Facebook, from LinkedIn, wherever you're posting and get them onto your website. And then your website has to get them from your website into your chair, butts in seats. And then your chair has to get them into your gym. Is your funnel doing that? Or are you just posting random stuff? Are you posting at all? Are you posting 10 times a week? If you're not, you don't have much of a social media funnel. Do you have a call to action at least on every third post? If you don't, you don't have a social media funnel. You have a social media presence. You have a platform, but it's not pulling you anywhere. Think about the number one influencer you follow, right? What is Taylor Swift doing posting about, hey, your gym teacher and your English teacher are getting married. She's pulling you somewhere. She's pulling you to buy the next album. She's pulling you to buy the next concert, the next thing that she's selling eventually, right? But she's not just being passive about that. You can't afford to be passive and you can't afford to wait until you have millions of fans like Taylor Swift does. And finally, the paid ads funnel. Are you actually paying these platforms to get in front of their clients? When a platform is new, they want content, but eventually they want advertising dollars and your clients are the product of that platform. The platform, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, whoever, is putting all your potential clients in one spot and then saying, okay, if you give me money, I'll let you talk to them. Sounds like a good deal to me. The reason that most people aren't using paid ads effectively is that they're scared of it. They're like, oh no,$5 a day, I might waste this if I'm bad at it. And it's true. But the reality is that all of the other gyms on your block are saying the exact same thing. The reason that some gyms get enormous value from Facebook ads is not because of the algorithm. It's not because of where they live. It's not something random. It's because they're good at it, right? The reason that some people get more results from their workouts than other people is because they're better at it. It's not the magic of the workout, really. It's not the programming. It's their execution. And so we want you to be good at the paid ads funnel. I run my ads at a budget of like three bucks a day. And that's more than enough for me because my ads are good. I've learned how to do that through mentorship. Then I just gave it to somebody else to run after I was good at it. And now that's all I have to do. Paid ads don't require millions and millions of dollars. They require you to be good at them. Are you running paid ads? Yes or no? If you're not, hey, that's okay. We're going to build that out next. Now, what I hope here is that I haven't made you feel bad or overwhelmed or stressed out or like, oh, I'm not doing any of this. All I want to do is make you understand that marketing is not a passive pursuit. If you own a business, whether that's a gym or something else, you need to be good at marketing. If you own a gym business, you are in one of the hardest businesses there is. The port-a-potty business is easier than the gym business. It's not as fun, not as good, but it's easier. And if you want to be successful in the gym business, you have to be good at marketing. So let's talk about how are your funnels working? So let's say that you just heard what I said. Okay. Yeah. I've got four funnels, Coop. We're good. We're good. Check, check, check. Let's go and move on. Now let's audit those funnels. How well are they working? So first off, are you measuring your set rate? Like how many people are booking appointments with you? Then you want to measure the show rate. How many of those people will actually show up? You and I, when we make an appointment, we show up, right? Or we feel horrible if we don't, we call in advance. That's not everybody, not anymore. And the fastest growing segment in micro gyms is the under 21s. I hate to say it, they're the most likely to ghost you. Are you measuring your show rate? Because if you measure it, there are ways to improve it, but we need to know where you're starting from. And third, hey, are you measuring your close rate? How many people actually show up, right? So what we want to see here is just like in the last podcast, are you getting an A, a B, a C, or an F at your marketing? So look, if you're measuring your set rate and 62% of people who go to your website are booking an appointment, amazing. That's an A. If 30% of the people who hit your website are booking an appointment, okay, that's a C. And if less than 30% are booking an appointment, that's a fail. If you don't know how to tell this, it's an automatic fail. If your website won't give you these numbers clearly, it's a fail. You need to fix your website. Your website has one job. It's not to project your art. It's not to show you off or tell your coaches bios. It's to get butts in seats. It's to get people from your other funnels into a no sweat intro, period. It's to get people who land on your website to book a no sweat intro. That's its sole job. It's got one job and that is it. From there, how many people actually show up? If 80% of the people who book an appointment in this day and age, that's good. That's an A. If two-thirds to 80% show up, okay, that's a C. You're average. If less than 66% of the people who book a no sweat intro actually show up, that's a fail. You need to work on lead nurture. That's what lead nurture is. It's getting butts to actually sit in the seats. And finally, your close rate. If you're closing at 80% or higher, that's an A. Congratulations, right? If you're like, I'm at 100% close rate, I guarantee you, you're not doing enough marketing. But 80% is great. Some of the leads are going to be cold, right? Don't let that scare you. If you're like, well, I want to maintain my 100% close rate, so I'm only going to work with referrals. You need to be doing more stuff. There's a balance here. If 66% to 80% of the people who show up actually buy, that's a C. You need to be working on your sales. Sales is the first act of coaching. You don't need to feel slimy. You're not tricking people. It's not bait and switch, but you need to get better at it. And if less than two thirds of the people who come in and sit down are not signing up, or if less than two thirds are signing up, you need to fix your closing, right? Probably what's happening is this. You're scared of selling. You don't want to feel slimy. You don't want to feel bad. You don't want to ask people for money. And so you're hiding by offering a free trial and people come in and they wash out, or you just let people People come in and you give them a free personal training and you think that's going to convince them and they're going to throw their credit card at you and that's it. No, that's not good enough. Sales is the first act of coaching. You are coaching them to commit to themselves. That's what sales is and you need to get better at it. Okay. Next, here's how you fix your lease. All right. Here's the good part, right? Here's the important stuff. Here's the reason that you came here. Now you're going to see a link in here where people can open up their two brand dashboard. We track all of this and I've got some samples from two brand clients in here. So just as a reminder, like you're going to get a lot of leads. Some of those leads are going to book an appointment. Some of those appointments are going to show up and some of those are going to close. What you can do here is you can say, you can identify your weak link. So in this case, if this gym has like 10 people booking their set rate here, okay. And only three showing up, that's their weakest link. You can also look at this on a graph. So I'm looking at this as green, yellow, red. I look at this as a mentor in two brain. I look at this gym February, their set rate was a yellow. Okay. Their show rate was 100%. Their lead nurture is super duper good. And their close rate was a yellow also. Two opportunities. Number one, close the leads that you get. Number two, get more leads to book appointments. Because this gym is good at show rate. Once somebody books an appointment, they're going to show up. They might not sign up, but they're going to get that gym to show up. That's awesome. If you look back in December here, you'll see it's red. They weren't booking enough appointments. And honestly, they're not closing very well. So the biggest opportunity here is obvious, like get better at sales. When you break a problem down like this and you track your metrics, this is how specific you can be. We can fix your marketing problem like that. I know exactly what you need to do instead of guessing or pulling like 50 different options out of the air or just thinking like, I need to do more on social media. This is how mentorship works. You take a big, complicated problem, like I need more clients. You break it down and break it down and break it down until, aha, there's the problem. Let's fix it. Just like you do with fitness for your clients. Okay. Next up. Here we go. Here's what you can do. All right. I promised you answers. Look, if you need more appointments, people are going to your website, but they're just not booking appointments. You can improve your speed to contact. So they fill out a form on your website, call them right away. Most gyms take almost 24 hours to call somebody back. If they call somebody back, that's crazy. That's somebody asking you for help. They're in the water, they're drowning, they're waving their hands, help me, help me. And you're like, I'll help you later. That's not going to work. Like you need to be fast. Early on when I was selling treadmills and we're talking like 1998, 1999, my boss said, Chris, imagine every phone call is worth$10,000. And guess what? If you're selling somebody a$200 a month membership and they stay for two years, every phone call, every time that phone rings, it's worth$2,400 to you. Why aren't you answering? answering that$2,400 phone call. The next thing you can do is improve the call to action on your website. If people are going on your website, but they're not booking a sales appointment with you, your website sucks. Fix it. Call Kilo. They'll get things sorted for you using data-proven websites. Website is not about art. It has one job, and that's to get appointments booked, period. Next, increase your outreach value. That means do more top of funnel stuff, publish more content, put more on social media more often, ask for more referrals. run more ads, okay? And call your leads faster. You find out anybody has filled out a form, you call them faster. That's speed to contact in one sense, but it could also be just like instant replay. If you're using a CRM like Kilo, like GLM, for example, you can set up an automation. So even if you're not available to call them right now, even if you're super shy, like you're an introvert like me, you can at least send them an automated text and get that conversation started and then jump in when you feel comfortable. If you need to improve your show rate, so people are booking a trial, they're booking a sales appointment with you, they're booking an also an intro, but they're not showing up, you need to improve lead nurture. So here's what you can do. Send personal messages through video or text. So I said you can do this automatically, but you shouldn't rely on that. If your automated texts are not getting people's butts in seats, send them a personal video. Hey, it's Coop, thought I was checking it. Audio is also fine. If you don't have a good hair day, if you're in a place where you can't send a video, send them a audio file. Then they know it's really you and it's not a bot. This is just going to get more and more important in the age of AI. Build rapport, text back and forth with them, chat with them. Once the appointment is set, it doesn't mean it's locked. It doesn't mean they're going to be shown up. You got to think of like you're sending out the tractor beam like in Star Wars. You need to have that conversation and walk them into your gym. Remember, the first act of coaching is convincing them to commit to themselves and sign up. The second they make contact with you, the coaching's starts and you got to coach them to come in, then you'll coach them to sign up and make that commitment. You can create some scarcity or urgency. So you can send them a text. Hey, look, I got a full day here. I'm really excited to talk with you, but if you're not going to be able to show up, please let me know in advance because other people want that spot. You can say that, okay? You can set up an automated reminder sequence. This is kind of your safety net. If you don't have time to text them yourself, send them a video text. This automated sequence is better than nothing. And finally, the last big thing, don't let people book an appointment two weeks from now. Something else will come up. They'll find a reason not to show up. Get them in tomorrow. Get them in tonight. Even if you have to do a video no sweat intro or something, that's better than having them wait two weeks. An in-person NSI is the best, but if they have to wait longer than 72 hours to do that and you can get them on a video call, do your sales approach that way. Fast is the best. NSI in-person is the best, but if the only way that you can get them in in the next couple of days is to do it on video, you can do that. If they have to wait till next week, I'll be in town next month. No, get it done right now. And if you need to improve your close rate, again, most of this is mindset. The reason that people aren't joining your gym, if they're coming in and they're sitting in your chair, they expect to sign up. You are the barrier, right? Another Taylor Swift joke is like, hi, it's me. I'm the problem. It's me. You're the reason they're not signing up. If they come into your chair, it's not because of price. It's not not because they have to talk to their spouse. They've already talked to their spouse. Their spouse knows where they are. They're not there in secret. If they give you those objections, you are the obstacle. Something you've said or done has stopped them from signing up. So here's some tips. Number one, pre-frame their problem before the appointment. Hey, super pumped to chat with you. What's the number one reason you're thinking about joining my gym? Ask them that. Send them that text. I just want to be prepared so that I know whether we can help you before this appointment. I also want to bring some things to the appointment that I think might help so that we can get off on the right foot, that kind of thing. Second, pre-qualify your leads. Look, in the beginning, if you don't have as many clients as you need, don't put your prices on your website. Not that you're hiding something, but you want to get the person in front of you so that you got the best chance of committing them. But you also need reps, you need practice, you need confidence, right? And so you want to get them into your gym. If you've got as many clients as you need and your gym's doing well, by all means, put your prices on your web I do because it's like, hey, if price is going to be an obstacle here, let's just get that out of the way first. Now, I've got a lot of gym owners who come to me and say, people aren't signing up. I've got the prices on my website. I don't want to talk to them unless they're ready to commit. Nobody's ready to commit until you talk to them. So until you have as many clients as you want, don't put your prices on your website. Build rapport, right? Have a conversation. I mean, one of my stories that I tell all the time This guy came in, his name was Jim. He signed up himself. He signed up his spouse on the spot and he eventually signed up both of his kids. They stayed for over four years as a family. They paid just between seven and 800 bucks a month between all four of them. No discounts for family. Kids were in the kids program. The adults were in our group training program and Jim was doing personal training on top of that. How did you sell that guy? How did you find this guy? The guy was not a high earning person. He was a conservation officer. And how did I sell? I had a conversation with him. I was like, Jim, when you're on a stakeout for illegal moose hunting, what do you do? And he's like, I read fiction. And I'm like, amazing. Who's your top three fiction authors? And he named some. I wrote them down. I'm like, hey, man, I read a lot of fiction too. Have you ever read Ken Follett? Have you ever read James Lee Burr? No and no. Dude, I'm going to ship you some of these books right now. I opened up Amazon right in front of him and shipped him books. And then I said, okay, well, hey, man, back to fitness. I know we've only got a half an hour here. Here's what I think you should do. He said, sign me up. This was great. I was worried it was going to be a sales pitch. That's the kind of rapport that you can establish with confidence only after you've done this a lot of times and you've built up the confidence. And honestly, you don't need the money, right? If you do need the money, you need reps. You need practice to get to the confidence. Clarify their problem. Hey, here's the thing you're trying to solve. Don't try to sell them on CrossFit. Don't try to sell them on kettlebells or bootcamp or technique or your class schedule or who else is there or your culture or your community, sell them on solving their problem. That's all they care about. All those other things are things that they will appreciate later, but not upfront. Nobody is Googling, you know, Jim with greatest culture and best community near me. No, they're Googling, how do I lose weight? They're Googling, how do I solve this stiffness? They're Googling, like, how do I get fit when I'm on the road on stakeouts five days a week? That's what they're looking for. And once they're in your chair, clarify their problem and tell them how you're going to solve it. Clearly tell them how you'll help. Hey, look, here's how this is going to work. If you really want to lose 30 pounds, you're going to need a couple of things. You're going to need a nutrition plan. You're going to need consistent workouts. And let's face it, you're going to need me to check in with you probably six days a week. You're also going to need to be able to text me. That is our top tier program. And explain that to them. Create conviction and then ask them to sign up. Be clear. Look, you're not there to waste their time. You're not there to waste your time. Nobody likes it when you're bouncing around, dancing around, beating around the bush. Stop wasting their time. Get to the point. Hey, would you like to start on Friday? I've got an opening. That's it, right? Now, if you're the kind that could never ask the girl to the dance, okay, you need some reps. You can practice on your dog, on your spouse. We've got GPTs that you can practice on in Two Brain. You can practice with your mentor. You can come to our office hours and you can role play this with a sales coach. You can practice this with other gym owners, with your peers. Do that. Get good before you practice on a live client because if they leave, there's$2,400 walking out the door. All right. Now, get more leads into your funnel. Once you're good at sales, once you're good at lead nurture, once you're good at converting people from your website into booking appointments, let's go. Let's add rocket fuel to the fire. Let's get more leads in. Here's what you can do. If you want to jack up your referral funnel, you want to get more leads, you can book more goal reviews because that's where you ask people for a referral. You don't just say, Do you know anybody who might like my gym? You get to know the client and you say, what will it take to get your husband gym in here? How can we bring your spouse, Linda, into the gym? Do you think that your coworker would like this? Okay. You be specific. Then you do the marketing with them. Hey, let's call Linda right now and invite her in. Let's book an appointment. Let's bring Jeff in. Okay. Hey, let's book a time when I can come in and talk to your staff about posture while they're sitting at their desk. Okay. You can run a quarterly bring a friend event. Okay. This is really, really simple. But if you just want to bring a friend event, bring your friend for free every Saturday, they won't do it. It will lose its impact. You can do a bring a friend event. We teach you how to set this up properly in Two Brain so that you're actually getting an SIs from it instead of just running groups for free for nothing. You can take coffee to your neighbors. You can start building up that sticky referral web in your neighborhood and you can book workplace seminars. We teach you how to do this stuff in Two Brain. If you want to get more leads from your content funnel, you can create a task list to keep you on track. Okay. You can give people valuable things. You can publish better content, right? If you're just like ranting into an iPhone once a week, that's better than nothing, but it's probably not enough to get a lot of leads. You can diversify your platforms, publish on YouTube, take the audio, put that on your podcast, take the transcript, publish it on your blog. Do not try to do this on day one. But if you've already got one of those things working, you can duplicate it into other realms and then build a container. Look, people are not listening to your podcast and then booking a call or buying from from your website. They need to get on your email list. They need to have a conversation. They need to get in your free public Facebook group. Whatever that container is, you need to go from a monologue to a dialogue to a sales pitch. Your social funnel. Hey, look, when you get on social media, make your post and get off social media in and out quickly. Post more often. Reels are the best, but if you can't do reels, I suck at reels, do pictures. If you use text a lot. Make sure that every fourth post has a call to action. So a jab is like, look at this interesting thing. Look at this post. Look at this milestone. Join my gym. Jab, jab, jab, right hook. Call to action on every fourth post at minimum. And finally, do a monthly 5130 post. Ask, hey, I'm looking for five people who have this one goal in common and want to work on that for the next 30 days with me. That's a 5130 post. Make that every month. If you need to do a paid ads funnel, you can get more leads by refreshing your creative. Look at what all your competitors are doing and copy them. There's no harm in this. You're not an artist, right? Steal. Use your mentor and two brain to help you refresh your creative. Test an alternate offer. You should be running three things at once. Here's how this works. You run three ads at once, okay? This is a science experiment. It's not art. You run them for 30 days. Let the algorithm do its thing. After 30 days, you pick the one that's doing the best and you throw the other two in the garbage. You just Just keep running that one ad. Now look, you know, meta platforms, especially has an AI that just does this for you now. All you got to do is get set up. We actually set up your initial ads in Facebook and Instagram for you in Tubrate. You don't even have to like learn it and apply it anymore. Like we used to do five years ago. Now we actually set them up for you. We set up the AI in meta and meta just keeps making it better and better based on who responds. Like ads have never been easier than they are right now. They've never been more effective and we can get this all set up for you. for you. All right. Look, I'm going to give you a little challenge before I sign off. I want you to pick one funnel, one level in one funnel, book an appointment with yourself, block off one hour tomorrow to improve that one thing, ask for more referrals, book more goal reviews, whatever that is. Okay. Then on the next day, you're going to do the next thing. The next day, you're going to do the next thing. Okay. So here's level one. If you're completely lost with marketing, you're not getting enough clients and this podcast just confused you, I want you to do this. Every month, ask for five referrals. Every month, post five big pieces of content. Every week, post five pieces on social media, and every day, spend$5 on paid ads. That's level one. That's enough to get you to a C grade in marketing. Level two, every month, ask for 10 referrals. Every month, post 10 big pieces of content, blog, podcast, YouTube. Every week, post 10 pieces of social media content, and every day, spend$10 on paid ads. Level three, every month, ask for 15 or And so next time I talk to you on Facebook or through an email, and I say, how's your gym going? You should be able to say, well, I'm doing great. well, it's not as good as I like, here's what I'm working on. Or Coop, it's not as good as I like, what should I do? And I should be able to give you something like this and say, do exactly this because that's what a mentor does. When you're in our mentorship program, you're on a call one-on-one with a mentor who's working on your gym, not just following the recipe for every gym, working on your gym and telling you here is exactly what you need to do. You'll spend a lot of your call going from a big complicated problem down to here is a fixable thing that you can do Here's the step you need to take right now. Here's the tool you need to do. You can do it. Call me tomorrow. You can do it. Call me next week. Tell me when it's done and we'll do the next thing. Brick by brick, you can build a marketing machine for yourself, but you've got to start from truth and you've got to break the problem down into actionable steps. I'm Chris Cooper. This is what I do for a living. I take big, complicated problems and I break them down into steps. Good mentors do that. If you're in a group coaching program, you're probably not doing that or you're probably left to try and figure it out for yourself. The first few times you do this, you need the help of a mentor. You can book a call with my team below and we'll see if we can get you set up in our program.