Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
AI and Liability for Gym Owners: What You Need to Know
Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” host Mike Warkentin talks with attorney and former gym owner Matthew Becker of Gym Lawyers PLLC about how to use AI safely in your business without creating massive liability.
Matthew breaks down the legal risks gym owners face when using AI tools, including operating outside their scope of practice, violating privacy laws and infringing on copyright.
Improper AI use can even increase exposure to lawsuits and eliminate liability protection.
So how can gym owners use AI without endangering their businesses?
Matthew recommends fitness entrepreneurs use AI as a research and education tool, not as a substitute for professional services, and leverage it to streamline admin work, generate ideas and polish client-facing materials.
Check out the full episode to find out how to save time with new technology while keeping your gym insulated from legal risk.
You can get in touch with Matt at Gym Lawyers PLLC via the link below.
Links
Gym Lawyers PLLC
Gym Owners United
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3:06 - Scope of practice dangers
7:32 - Increasing exposure & liability
14:23 - Skipping professional support
17:12 - Uploading confidential information
25:34 - How to use AI safely
All right, I uploaded your complete medical history and I had AI cook up the perfect workout for you based on your health conditions. Here we go. Today, 100 cents of 10 squats at 315. That is your workout. If you have any issues, talk to the bots. I'm out of here. Master.
SPEAKER_02:I'm not going to be able to walk for days if I don't end up in the hospital with random medicine. Talk to the bots. Passing off the liability.
SPEAKER_01:You mean I can't use AI for absolutely everything, completely risk-free, and pass off all liability?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, Mike, it would be so nice if we could. My job would be so much easier.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, if that's the case, we should dig into that. We'll uh help some gym owners use AI properly without opening themselves up to massive liability. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I'm Mike Working, and please hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening with my thanks. My guest today, Matthew Becker of gymlawyers.com. He's the former owner of Industrial Athletics in Pittsburgh. He's our go-to when we have a legal question for gym owners. So, Matthew, welcome. I uh don't actually do that workout I gave you.
SPEAKER_02:What's up, Mike? No, it's all good. I did uh I did a bunch of thrusters last week and like I couldn't walk for the rest of the week. So no, I'm not gonna do I don't even know if I could back squat 315 anymore. It's sad to admit.
SPEAKER_01:We won't make you do that workout and find out if how how when you get buried at what rep. But we are, you know, you and I used to joke about this. It wasn't that long ago. It was maybe a year and a half, maybe two years. We used to joke about gym owners who downloaded waivers from the internet and then uh used a find and replace to alter complex legal documents with the click of a button and then run with it. And we thought that was pretty funny, but things have gone way, way further now with AI. So lay it out for us what are the biggest risks gym owners face when using AI now?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So it goes beyond just like using AI to draft your legal documents. I mean, sure, we don't want to do that. We can get into why we don't want to do that. But regardless of what we talk about throughout the rest of the episode, I want the gym owners to really think about one of three different sort of legally issues, if you will, with using AI. Um, so anytime we use AI to do something within our business, we're gonna potentially open ourselves up to one of these three problems. One, we're gonna extend outside the scope of our practice. Um, and we can talk about sort of like in what instances that might come up. Two, we're gonna increase our legal exposure. You know, we may weaken our ability to fight against lawsuits, say for personal injury or or or credit card dispute or something like that. Uh and then, you know, the three, the third problem is we're potentially bringing on more liability that we could be passing off to others if we use other professionals to do something instead of just trying to rely on on AI to say, again, draft our legal documents, do our accounting, come up with our tax issues or resolve our tax issues. So again, those three is kind of in summary is going outside of our scope of practice, increasing our exposure, and eliminating the ability to pass off liability onto other professionals. So pretty much everything we're going to talk about is gonna fall into one of those three categories.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's deal the first one. Let's look at scope of practice because this is a really important one, and you can definitely take some odd steps here because you're just feeding everything to the bots and it's an expert on everything, and you can sometimes get into some gray areas. So lay out this one. Where should scope of practice sit with relation to AI?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so if we go back like before AI, right? You know, like it is I I guess that is the there will be like a a what would it be? Not like a BC and an AD, right? But like it's the dark ages of some sort, like pre-post-COVID, we're gonna have pre-post-AI. Anyway, we used to have you you and I had talked a little bit about it, and Coop used to put material out about like scope of practice outside of let's say nutrition. And so the the the age-old question of like how much can I actually prescribe to my clients revolving around nutrition and can I do macros and can I just do healthy habits? And you know, we would see things there by like going outside of your scope of practice because your state says if you're going to prescribe macros, you need to be a registered dietitian. Something like that.
SPEAKER_01:Regulated professions, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. If you're gonna offer some kind of physical therapy, you need to be a registered physical therapist. If you're gonna offer some sort of massage to your clients, you need to be a massage therapist. You know, there are there are professional licenses that we need if we're going to do things outside of like what we learned in our CrossFit level one trainer's uh certification, right? Or I should say trainer's certificate. It's not a certification anyway. So the the so to kind of bring this around, where where this comes into an issue now is like if now that I have AI and AI is an educated physical therapist, if I've got a client that comes in with, say, like a ruptured disc in his back, and I want to, I want to be like, I'm the go-to for everything in the past, I'd be like, I don't know how to fix a ruptured disc. So I'm going to either bring in a physical therapist or I'm going to send you out to a physical therapist. And we've talked in the past about or like two-brained about, you know, like you create your professional network. So you have a professional referral network within your community. You know, I don't need that now, right? I can just go to ChatGPT and be like, hey, I've got a client that's got a ruptured disc in his back. I want to help my client fix this. Give me a month's worth of programming to fix my client's ruptured disc, right?
SPEAKER_01:There it is.
SPEAKER_02:There it is. And then I go in and I start rehabbing my client and their ruptured disc. I've gone, I've extended outside of my scope of practice as a CF level two. Yep.
SPEAKER_01:And that's super common. You mentioned nutrition, that happens a lot. Certain states are very regulated, some states not regulated very much at all. And it just depends on where you are. But you can't diagnose and treat injuries as a personal trainer. You can't give you know precise diet plans in certain places and so forth. Healthy habits is a way around that. But the scope of practice, the same as it was 20 years ago, still exists as a personal trainer. It doesn't change because AI gives you more access to information. Is that essentially what we're getting at?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. You can use it to educate yourself.
SPEAKER_01:Sure.
SPEAKER_02:But the moment that, and and this especially becomes more difficult as we get more confident and comfortable with the information that we're getting from AI, that all of a sudden, during our no-sweat intro, I say, you know what, Mike? I've helped other people fix their ruptured discs in your back. I've got a program for you.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_02:That's where we have the problem. It's fine using it to educate myself on how to help you fix your ruptured disc. But the moment that I start holding myself out as the person who can help you fix your ruptured disc, now I've exceeded my scope of practice and we've got a problem.
SPEAKER_01:And that's where you start getting into that like duty of care negligence and errors. And that was what the scope of practice was designed to limit in the first place, meaning, like, as a personal trainer, I may not be qualified to tell you exactly what to eat for to address a medical condition, right? Because they just don't work. They don't, one education set does not transfer to the other one. This is the same situation, and you can really get yourself into some issues here if you start playing outside where you're at. So let me give you a scenario. Let's say I do have a client with a ruptured disc, and I say, Here's the workout I had planned for a client with a ruptured disc. Let's talk about some things that would allow this person to still work out even around that condition without treating or diagnosing or doing anything to rehab that condition. What are some common modifications that have worked for other people? I get that printout, I review it as a qualified personal trainer and create a workout plan designed to allow that person to work without you know pain-free, according to the, you know, the care pro uh the advice of the care provider. Would something like that work?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And that's uh that kind of starts to go into like scope or or issue number three. Again, we're kind of going by issue number one, two, and three. Here, right. So are we outside of our scope of practice? Maybe not, because there's nothing wrong with educating yourself as a trainer, right? There's nothing wrong with reading a book on kinesiology in order to understand the body better so that you can better increase the dorsiflexion of your client. There, there's nothing wrong with that. But are we doing it in a way that puts us into issue number two, where now we're increasing our exposure. Unfortunately, the more information that you have, the more information you're giving your client, the more potential you are for being having a negligent duty of care in what you're you're delivering to your client, right? That's why we have malpractice insurance and things like that, because more educated we are, the more likely we are to mess up, unfortunately. Okay. So, yes, you can educate yourself, you can use that education in order to better service your client. You are increasing your exposure a little bit, but then the we we get into that third area of now we don't have anybody to pass that liability off to. If there is a problem, because let's go down that scenario and I use my education in order to adjust and modify, and I do it improperly, and you get injured, you sue me, we end up in court, I'm sitting on the stand and I'm being grilled at, well, you know, why did I have you do XYZ? And I say, well, because I went and used Chat GPT in order to teach me how to fix somebody. So I educated myself and I used it in my scope of practice in order to better service my client. Well, I'm now absorbed all of that liability because I can't push that liability off on chat to be like, well, that's what chat told me to do. Whereas if I called up my physical therapist buddy and I said, Hey, I've got this guy, he's got a ruptured disc. I need some, you know, some modifications or programming in order to better provide service to my client. And then you get injured and you sue me, I can be like, Well, I called a professional, and that's what the professional told me to do. I can push that exposure or that liability off onto that that other professional. So that that's how that's why we have those three different types of expo uh potential exposure or issues when we're using AI.
SPEAKER_01:So increased exposure is essentially, you know, you're you're maybe not outside your scope of practice, but you're you're definitely like expanding things in a bit, you know, let's not say it's like a gray area, I guess, for lack of a better term, where you're not clearly doing something wrong, but you are taking some steps in a larger direction. And AI can really be a rabbit hole for that because it's like gives you all the stuff, and then it says, Would you like this? You're like, Would you like more? Would you like this? Yeah. Would you like a complete back rehab training plan? Yep. And like, ooh, you know, so that is that the essence of the exposure where you just start doing more and all of a sudden the scope of everything gets broader and you're starting to work at the edges of that scope of practice?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. And you know, dude, you may end up going outside of the scope of practice as far as your insurance is concerned, too, because you end up going down that rabbit hole where you're right. Like, if I read a book and I have a question, I got to go seek out the answer to that question further. If I if I go to chat and I say, hey, give me this workout, and then I got a question, like it's doing a really darn good job of predicting my next question and just feeding me the answer.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I don't want gym owners to walk away from this being like, well, I can't educate myself. Matt said, Well, you know, what do you mean I can't educate? That's not what we're doing. It's a fantastic tool. Just understand that you do still have limits on what you're doing as a trainer. And it doesn't make you Superman just because the literally the answers are at the thing at your fingertips more than ever before.
SPEAKER_01:This question, I think, is gonna lead into you know, passing off liability bucket three, but I'm gonna ask it with relation to the first the second thing you said. And it's it's it's just about you know, can I use this stuff and can I like can I get a program or programming ideas or workout ideas and then review that carefully as an expert personal trainer, put something together that I approve, and then I've like, I'm not passing it off, not saying the robots did this, I'm saying I got some ideas here and I've evaluated them, I've set this up according to my school of practice and professional standards, the knowledge that I have. Is that less risky?
SPEAKER_02:I yeah, I definitely think it is. That's sort of the old trust but verify answer to, right? And and I think that's where, like, yes, we're telling everybody be cautious, but we're not telling people like don't do it to in its fullest extent. But sure, if you're gonna ask chat to to design an entire program for you or or design a nutrition plan or something, don't just turn around, copy, paste it into a word, eliminate the you know, the the lines that chat seems to love to put in everything that makes it so clear that this came from AI. Just you know, and change it to Times New Roman and then send it out and and and and and use it as your own. That's fine. I don't know, chat no. Um but you know, let uh use it, get the education, get the get the program, but then check it also to make sure that it is actually accurate within your within your own education, your own knowledge. And if if it puts something in there that you're like, that doesn't really seem accurate, look it up, like like dive a little bit deeper to make sure that you're not just reproducing something that is increasing your exposure because you tried to do it super fast and you didn't want to waste the time reviewing what was produced by the AI.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and that's good advice for literally anything you do would do with those programs, like anything that you would ask. Review them because they're not perfect. And sometimes it'll say something to me, and I'll be like, uh, dude, like that are you sure that? Like, oh, you're right, he got me away. That's not correct. And like, what you know, like you because everybody runs into those ones where they just, it's like I made a mistake. Like, oh, that could be very costly if it was like which is the number one stock to pick and so forth. But I could see something like this, where I could say, I have a client who wants to build uh bigger glutes. Uh, give me, according to the research out there, the top five exercises for glute activation. And it's like done. I'm like, hey, I really like this one, these glute bridges with a plate or whatever it is. I'm gonna use those and I'm gonna program this in three sets of eight to ten because that's the hypertrophy range, and we're gonna do rest about 40 seconds. I'm all in my scope of practice. I'm just using the thing for idea generation, but then I'm doing the hard work, like the heavy lifting on that. I love stuff like that. I also love stuff like this where I could say, hey, I've got this pretty ugly workout program. Could you format this and make it look pretty and professional? No, stuff like that's great. It's not changing your stuff. I love all of that. So those are some ways to use things safely because we're let's be real, like you said, people aren't not going to use AI, but there are some cautions there. And let's dig into that other one. Let's dig into the one about like the passing off of liability, because this is a big one where it's very easy to wash your hands and say, oh, that was a robot error, but like the matrix isn't taking responsibility for that. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Yep. And that's where the you know the use the professionals, you know, don't use chat as a way to get around using other professionals. And I think this uh maybe, maybe I'm a little bit you know biased or whatever, that like people are trying to do a lot to save money, say, on hiring professional services. They're like, well, I can just put my taxes into chat and it'll tell me how to file my taxes, I don't need to pay a CPA to do it, or I can just have chat write a liability waiver for me, I don't need to pay an attorney to do it, or my you know, partnership agreement, I don't need to pay an attorney to do that. And meanwhile, the you know now not only is the gym owner increasing their own exposure, but they're taking on the professional liability of doing something that there are trained professionals out there to do. If you get sued, if you if if you use chat to draft a liability waiver and you put that in front of the client and the client get injured, chat's not going to be the one suing you, an attorney is gonna be the one that's gonna sue you. You know, that that client is gonna actually hire a professional to do it, so you should probably hire a professional to protect it against uh protect against that. And if the waiver that chat produced is in violation of your state laws and the entire thing gets gets uh becomes null and void from the court, you don't have anybody to pass that exposure off on. Like if I draft the waiver and it's in violation of your state laws and it all becomes null and void, that's called malpractice. That's what malpractice is for. That's right, you can now come back and you can push that exposure off on me as the attorney to say you drafted this for me and it's wrong. I'm now threatened with a lawsuit for personal injury. That's my problem as the attorney.
SPEAKER_01:And that's where insurance kicks in, right? Like that's where that those things come in in a lot of cases, like maybe not exactly that one, but insurance is there to cover up for some liability, right? And if you invalidate it, you're kind of screwed.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Except you know, the the number one reason that you're gonna be denied, a gym owner is gonna be denied insurance coverage is if they didn't have a liability waiver or they didn't have a liability waiver covering the service that they were offering. Right. You know, the the the and that's gonna be the insurance's first opportunity to be like, not my cover, you know, not our fault. Same thing with me. That's why I have to carry malpractice insurance, is because humans are infallible, and if I screw up, I need to be able to, you know, I don't I don't want that coming out of my pocket. But you know, to your point, uh if you mess up your taxes and all of a sudden you owe fifty thousand dollars to the feds, you can't be like, I'm suing chat because chat did my taxes wrong. Like, I'm suing open AI. And they're gonna be like, it literally says at the bottom, you cannot take this as legal advice, you cannot take this as accounting advice, use a professional. So yeah, you're you're you're absorbing professional liability that you don't have to because there are professionals out there that are trained to do this.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Let me let me ask you this one about the one I hinted at in the intro that we scripted there. The uh the confidential information stuff where you're uploading medical stuff or credit card numbers into the into yeah, in the cloud, wherever that goes. Like, what what where are we at with that? How does that work?
SPEAKER_02:So with something like personal medical information, yeah. I was try I was talking with my wife before we started recording. Um she's she was a nurse and sort of thinking about like how would a gym owner use that? Because I was like, if again, if you've got like a a slip to disk, oh, I just keep going with the slip to disc or the ruptured disc or something in your back. I don't necessarily have to go on and be like, I'm working with a client named Mike, and he is X years old from this place in Canada, and he, you know, that's all personally identifiable information that is going to put us into like this is potentially a HIPAA violation because chat is not, you know, a recognized program to protect against personal identify uh personally identifiable information for medical reasons. But there could be uh a reason that I would do that with credit cards or or other personally identifiable information, that you know, I wanted chat to create a a data bat a dot database for all of my clients so that I can track my affinity marketing or something like that. Now I'm putting in really sensitive information that's not protected in any way and is a breach of probably a breach of privacy for a lot of my client information that I'm now again increasing my exposure because I'm giving private information over to this over over to Chat GPT that is not a protected locked down system.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and we don't know exactly what happens to that stuff. It just goes up in the cloud and you know, God knows what they do with it, right? Like, you know, I but it's there. It's there if they want to look at it. Someone can do something with it. So would you advise people? Because I know people are doing this, I guarantee people are firing all sorts of information into things and saying, organize this, make this look better, give me a report on this. Would you advise them not to do that?
SPEAKER_02:I think you have to be very careful about what information you're giving over to chat or you know, Gemini. We don't have to pick on Chat GPT this entire time, I'm sure. Any of them, yeah, whatever it is. We can pick on Gemini too. But um, you know, any of the information that we're putting in there, we have to now understand that we've just basically, you know, the you you and I talked once before about this, Mike, and you you you came up to the analogy of like if I wouldn't leave that information sitting on a table at a coffee shop when I get up to go to the bathroom, I probably shouldn't put it into ChatGPT as well. Because we don't know. They claim that what I'm talking to Chat GPT about, chat is not using to educate itself to go over and answer somebody else's answer. But I don't know. I mean, I'm kind of just trusting that, right? And I don't know that I could ever prove that or they could ever disprove it or anything else, but they they do admit that chat uses information that is out there on the internet in order to educate itself uh to provide better answers, and it's constantly learning with that stuff. So you just have to understand that it's it's not private. What you're doing is not proprietary, it's not private, you don't own it, and we don't actually know what would happen to it if anybody ever challenged what the output was of ChatGPT based on the information that you inputted into ChatGPT.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and this one you just touched on it's not a huge concern. We'll just I'll bring it up anyways, is like the idea of proprietary information. I'm gonna gym owners don't do a ton of this stuff in the sense that like your programming of squats and thrusters is not the special sauce that like no one else can ever figure out. Like we we got past that in you know 2009 or so, and we all realized thrusters and full-up pull-ups are all the same. But anyway, but there are situations where proprietary information released into the wild could could be a bit of a problem. And I could see you know, an example that I that I I thought of was, you know, we had a guy he wrote the Definitive Guide to OCR obstacle horse race training. Really cool book, named Rich Borgati. Great guy, great, great, great book. Now, had he, this was published a few years back, had he decided to pump that into AI? We have no idea if AI would then start to use that as a resource to tell other people stuff or give other people ideas and what would happen if pieces of that book started showing up in other people's like we don't know, right? So like it's if it's proprietary, it might be a problem at some point. Am I right there?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you are. And that kind of goes into down into the rabbit hole of of intellectual property and IP protection a little bit, which again isn't like I I don't know that gym owners are really like worrying too much about intellectual property, but where this could become an issue is let's go back to your the example of the guy who wrote the book on OCR. If he you can use like when chat first came out, like everybody was like, I'm using this to write my book. And and they would be like, you know, write me a funny book about space aliens or whatever, and then they put that on Amazon and try to sell it and and you know make make a lot of money and whatever. But dozens of dollars. Yeah, it doesn't. The the problem there is what what chat sends back out to you, you do not own. It's it's not your intellectual property, it's it's owned by uh open AI essentially. Um and and so if I'm gonna use chat to write my book and then I'm gonna take try to take and and copyright that book, I didn't create it. So we go, we walk in the and the court systems are going haywire about this uh at the moment because we don't we don't know what to do with it. Uh, you know, or or if I go and and here's another problem, if I go on to to AI and I'm like, hey, create me this marketing plan. And chat goes out and searches the internet on how to best do a marketing plan for me at my gym, and it starts to take protected intellectual property from somebody else and use it in its output for me. And then I turn around and use it. I've just violated somebody else's intellectual property. We see this, you know, with images and things like that where you know, we've got it's coming up recently, and I'm not sure if this is an issue that we're gonna end up having to talk to talk at some point about, but there are now firms, intellectual property law firms out there that are like scanning the internet for images that gym owners are using on their blog posts and in their marketing and everything else, and like they downloaded it off a Canva, or maybe they got it from AI or something. And this firm is saying you did not have the rights to use that in your marketing. You've now, you know, breached copyright, you've you've uh infringed on a trademark, you know, something to that effect. But again, this is where this is a one of these where we can't pass off the liability now because we asked chat to create it. Chat breached somebody else's or infringed on somebody else's intellectual property to give us the answer that we do not own. So we just have to be aware that like that's a problem.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I don't, you know, I I could see a scenario in two years or less where copyright doesn't exist anymore. Like, I don't know how they police that stuff anymore, where like you can you can create a song in the style of ACDC or uh give me a space villain in a robot suit with a cape and everybody's it's all Darth Vader. Like these images, like you've seen these ones, I think it was Super Mario or something like that, where someone was publishing stuff like that because every time I would ask uh for a certain thing, it would create basically a small variation of a copyrighted character or something. Like I don't know how you police this. It's impossible. And the card is so far out of or the uh the horse is so far out of the barn that it doesn't even matter anymore. But in this interim period, I could see some stuff cropping up where you might not want to use some of that. And like the image stuff is crazy. I've seen some of these lawsuits against gyms where these companies will come in and say, you use this image here as your bill, and it's awful. Like it is beyond ruthless. And like you got to be careful with that stuff for sure. But AI it creates this gray area where it's like it created an image based on an image, based on an image, but it's still kind of the image and it's still kind of the person and still kind of copyrighted, and we're not kind of sure. And you still kind of got to pay the legal bill, you know. So it's like one of those things where you got to be really cautious. And we won't dwell on this because we're gonna be a little bit more into the risk and stuff that we talked about for gym owners, but this is an interesting one that comes up and we'll have to see where copyright goes. But let's close this out, Matthew. Let's give people some we've talked about some don'ts and stuff. Let's talk about some just some things that they can use AI for safely, because I know people, I don't want people to walk out of here saying, I can't ever use this thing again because it's the hugest tool that's come out in so many years. What can gym owners do? Like, what would you recommend that's a really safe way for them to maximize the use of AI to get ROI on their their time?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, and I appreciate that because I don't always want to be the professional buzzkill.
SPEAKER_01:Even though it's on the business card.
SPEAKER_02:I I know. I I get on these podcasts, I get on calls, and I'm like, you can't do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. It's like Matthew, the fun police is around.
SPEAKER_02:I'm not listening to that episode. Matt's just gonna kill my kill my spirit again. Yeah, so let's have some fun.
SPEAKER_01:What can we do here? What can gym owners do?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, again, it's a fantastic tool for education. It's a fantastic tool for research. Uh it's a fantastic tool to sit down at 5 30 at night and start down a rabbit hole that you don't get out of until 8 30 at night. And you're like, what happened? I'm a stun, I know kung fu. Yeah. Um and I think it's a fantastic way to go and like get ideas. Like, I'll do it. I'll even do it in my, you know, well, I'll have a client call and they'll be like, this is what I want to do. And I'm like, uh, hey chat, this is what, you know, this is again, can you give me some ideas here? And and and then I take, you know, and you you take that information, you take that education, and you turn around, you fit in with your scope of practice, and you become a better business owner or a better trainer as a result of that. Uh, and there's nothing wrong with doing that, as long as you're staying within your scope of practice, as long as you know that you're increasing your exposure, and as long as you're not absorbing liability that you could push off onto other professionals. Um, and I think as long as we're aware of those three things, I mean, it I I'm blown away by the the things that we can do with AI. Um, and I don't think anybody should be shying away from it. Trust but verify the information.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So I mean the big one then is like stay inside your scope of practice when you're operating. Try not to uh open yourself up to any additional risk, and try not to like pass off or create liability where you are otherwise protected or where none exists. You know, those are kind of the three, I think if I'm if I'm hearing you, those are the three big rules of this. But aside from that, you can use this thing to do a ton of research to educate yourself, come up with monster amounts of ideas, format things, make things look a whole lot better than you probably would on your own. You can do a like I, you know, an idea here would be like give me an idea of 15 lines for a Facebook ad that are designed to convert clicks to my gym. And you get just this giant list of stuff. And then you're just like, these three are good. Let's change this. I'm gonna refine. And you could do stuff like that all the time. You know, you could definitely like give me newsletter ideas designed to increase engagement on my list of contacts who are not active clients. What do they need to see? So, like all sorts of ideas that you can use and then create. And you could even go in this case, you could even say, like, okay, write that newsletter and let's adjust and do that. There's tons of ways you can do this, but where you want to stop is that that firm line, you know, we're talking, we're in baseball playoff season here. You've got those the boundaries, the foul lines. Do not go, that's your scope of practice, do not go out into the dugout area. You want to stay right in the field of play, and you definitely do not want to open yourself up to liability, which might be like not wearing a batting helmet. You know what I'm talking about? Where you take the baseball analogy one step further, but like just try not to absorb any risk by really starting to get weird there. And here's the thing that I'm gonna bring up here, Matt. I'm gonna blow your horn. You're the guy who can help people with this stuff, the real person who can solve a lot of problems for gym owners. And we bring you on the show because you're so great at helping gym owners put legal stuff in perspective. How can they work with you and what can you do for them?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. So we're just another professional within your professional network. When you were talking about that, I was thinking, you know what? Actually, what we should do is look at chat as another profession and a professional in our professional network. Sort of like an assistant or a research assistant or something like that. If I give you, if I say, hey, look, you need to refile your LLC as an S corporation, I can say that as an attorney. I'm not going to do it because I'm going to send you over to the C the CPA to do it. And I think it's, you know, you could ask chat like, how can I better save on my taxes? And it's going to give you a whole bunch of ways to do it. And then you take it to your tax professional uh in order to implement those tax changes. But that's why your professionals are out there. And I appreciate the softball and the basic. And I'm gonna nail it out of the park. Yeah, the the best way to find us, honestly, is just to go to the website, jimlawyers.com. We've got calls to action all over the site. My cell phone's on there, my email address is on there. Um, if you just put any information on any of the calls to action, you'll be forwarded in my scheduling calendar to get 45 minutes to just go over all of your different issues. You know, I'll give you another area where I appreciate when the when a client uses chat GPT is when, let's say a client, uh, they're like, you know, I want to come up with some sort of XYZ agreement for a staff member or something like that. And then instead of us having to sit on the phone for 30 minutes and me asking every question about like what do you want me to put into this agreement? I've had a couple of times where a gym owners would be like, I want to create a a staff agreement, and I worked with Chat GPT in order to come up with all the different things that I want to put in my my staff agreement. Can you make this legal? There you are. Perfect sample. Great. That made my life really easy. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and so yeah, anywhere on the website, I know I we use Chat GPT to come up with our other firm, our new gym selling firm, Jim Ventures. We used it to come up with a name. We're like, here's here's what we want to do. What do we call this? And we got like 10 different names, and we were like Jim Ventures. Sounds pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01:I like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, it's it's a tool, it's out there, you can use it. Be cautious. Come to gymlawyers.com and I'll we'll we'll we'll chat about ways that you can do cool things in the legal without without exposing yourself through AI.
SPEAKER_01:And that's really the key of it. Let's seal it up with the example. You know, you're like, hey, I don't know where to start. Just opening a gym. I don't know what my legal can you give me a checklist of documents I a gym would need to operate legally. And then you take that to Matt and say, what which of these can you help me with? And Matt says, all of these, and away we go. Stuff, you know, like stuff like that, right? That's where you can start using these things. But again, vet the information, talk to your professionals, don't assume there's no liability, and for God's sake, stay within your scope of practice. That's the same as it ever was 1972, 2028, whatever the year it's gonna be. Keep that in mind. Stay within your scope of practice. Matthew, thanks so much for sharing your information with us. We'll have you back on here when the next legal issue pops up, probably in a month or two.
SPEAKER_02:We'll be back on to talk about uh not using images in your blogs anymore because you're gonna get that$2,500 settlement demand from the intellectual property firm that's tracking everybody down.
SPEAKER_01:I saw a settlement demand, Matthew, that was literally it was six figures, and the guy said, I can't pay. And this the the counteroffer was whatever is in your bank account. It was awful. So we'll get it eventually we'll hit copyright, but not right now. Thanks, Matthew. That was Jim Lawyer Matthew Becker. He's at gymlawyers.com and Jim Ventures. That's his new one. So if you have any of those interests or needs, check that out and talk to Matthew. Thanks for listening. This has run a profitable gym. Please hit subscribe on your way out the door. I'm your host, Mike Working, and as always, with thanks. Please check the show out next week. We'll have something great for you, and Chris Cooper will be on. Speaking of him, here's Chris Cooper with a final message.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, it's Two Brain Founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I'd love to have you in that group. It's Gym Owners United on Facebook or go to gym ownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
