The 2026 Annual Plan for Gym Owners: Your Monthly Guide to Growth

A year from now, your gym will be better or worse. That is a hard truth. 

And “better” doesn’t happen by accident. It only happens if you, the CEO, choose a direction, set priorities and execute today.

To help you thrive next year, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper shares the exact annual plan he's using at his gym, Catalyst. It's 12 months of simple, battle-tested activities that will:

✅ Improve retention.
✅ Produce leads and new clients.
✅ Generate revenue.
✅ Boost average revenue per member.
✅ Reduce stress.
✅ Inspire and retain staff.
✅ Put more cash in your personal bank account.

Customize Coop's plan or use it verbatim. But get something in place right now so you control your destiny in 2026.

To get Coop's "Essential 12-Month Gym-Building Plan for 2026"—including a customizable event calendar—use the link below to send him a DM through our Gym Owners United group.

Links

👉 Message Coop here: Gym Owners United

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0:01 - Intro

3:43 - January, February, March

14:32 - April, May, June

27:17 - July, August, September

35:09 - October, November, December

40:22 - Grow your gym in 2026

Transcript

Chris: 0:03

It's almost the end of 2025, and hopefully it has been a record-breaking year for you, like it has for me. I can remember though when the years were not that great. And particularly, I can remember this one year where it was August 2009 and I had the rent coming due and I had it was like a three-pay month and I had to pay my property taxes the same weekend and I hadn't been paid. It was just kind of this perfect storm of expenses. And I said to myself, man, if I have to live through this August 2009 again, I'm never going to do it. I'm going to get out of the business. And then I quickly realized that the only way to not be repeating this problem was to make a plan for the next year to make sure that I didn't have these big dips in revenues and all these, you know, trifecta of ERT happening to me. That means ever since then, I've made an annual plan. And for the last few years, I've been sharing my annual plan for my gym with everybody. And that's what I'm here to do today. So I'm Chris Cooper. I'm the founder of Two Brain Business. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And our mission is to help 10,000 gyms become successful. Part of being successful in the future, or even just changing your future, is to plan for it. And so I've got this brand new guide that you can get from me. I'm going to show it to you. You can just go to gymownersunited.com. That's a Facebook group. You find me in that group. You say, Coop, can I please have the annual plan? And I'm just going to give you this guide. Today I'm going to walk you through it and I'm going to show you some of the tools that we use within TubeBrain, our mentorship practice, to help the gym owners who are inside the Two Brain family too. So, first off, here's the guide. And you can use this a couple of different ways. You can use this as a template, you know, or you can use it verbatim. You can copy exactly what's in there. I was trying to be as specific as I possibly could when we were creating this this year so that you could just use the default setting on every single month. If you follow this plan and you execute well on it, your gym will be better a year from now than it is today. And that's the question we always have to be asking ourselves as gym owners. Is our gym better today than it was a year ago? And if it's not, well, that means unfortunately it's on us as the CEO to change things for 2026. The good news is you can do it. I'm going to show you the step-by-step plan that I have for my gym for 2026. You can copy that. I've left some gaps here that you can fill in. You can scratch out what I'm doing and put in something else. What's most important though is that you repeat the most important things over and over and that you don't neglect anything. So you're never walking into December 2026 with no plan, no idea what to do. You know, you're just like combing the podcast archives for some new ideas. In fact, what I actually do every year is I print this off with exactly what I'm going to be doing and I stick it on a wall behind me in my gym. That way I always know what's coming up and what I need to be thinking about to keep executing on this plan and keep growing my gym. You know, the most challenging part of the year for most gym owners is right now. And according to our state of the industry metrics, which is the biggest data set in the industry, you know, right now, November is when you've got the fewest leads coming in, which translates into fewer appointments in December and fewer sales in December. You know, if you build this plan today, you can actually add December 2025 to this. It's not too late, and generate some revenue or pull some revenue from January and collect it earlier to get you through that cash flow slump. But most importantly, you're not going to even have that cash flow slump next year if you do this stuff. Okay. We do an annual plan with everybody inside the two-brain family, all thousand gyms. They do this one-on-one every year because we want to make sure that they're always growing and growing and growing, even when they're no longer in our mentorship program, that they know and they have the skills to keep doing this on their own too. So here's the guide. And again, if you want to get it, I'm going to walk through step by step. I'm going to tell you what all of these different things mean. I'm going to go month by month. If you want to copy this guide, you just send me a DM on Facebook or even on Instagram at the TwoBrain Business account, and I'll get it to you. So let's start with January. One of the really important things that we all need to do every year is audit our marketing funnels. And once a year is the bare minimum. If you can do this quarterly, even better. What you want to do is sketch out your funnel for referrals. Then you want to sketch out your funnel for organic social media. You want to sketch out your funnel for content. You want to sketch out your funnel for paid ads. And you want to go through each step in order and say, like, okay, how am I generating leads? How well am I converting those leads? And then how often are those leads signing up? Now, for clients in TwoBrain, this is very step by step, and this is all broken down. So if this already sounds like it's overwhelming for you, don't worry. Once you're in the two brain mentorship program, we're going to break this down into small steps. My job is to demystify that whole murky magical web of marketing and make it something that you can do. So, for example, you know, when two brain people start their month, they're they go into their toolkit, okay, and they look at all the tools that are available to them. Okay. So here's how to get more clients, here's how to build out your funnels, here's how to nurture your leads, here's how to sell. Okay. And we've got this for like every metric that you could possibly use. There's dozens of these. In fact, there's so many helpful courses and tools that you need a mentor kind of to help you decide which one to do at first. And that's totally natural, right? And a mentor gets you results faster because they tell you what to do and what to wait till later. But when you get into the funnel audit, what we want to do here is we want to start with just the worksheet. Okay. We want to say, do you actually have four funnels built? Okay. We want to look at all of them. If you don't, well, for two-brained clients, here they are. And these are separate courses that they can walk through one step at a time. Then you can audit your funnels by saying, like, okay, here's the targets you want to hit. Then, you know, based on what your targets are and what your reality is, you can do a marketing chain analysis. Here's exactly how you get more leads, get more of those leads to book appointments, get more of those appointments to show up and buy. And finally, a little challenge to get you to do this whole thing within like 30 days. Within 30 days, you could easily have four funnels set up. And so we want you in December just to audit these funnels, go through it step by step and say, where are the holes? Now you can do this even if you're not in two brain, of course, because I've given you the basic instructions here. But if this is completely overwhelming and you're like, four funnels, what what do I even do? Or hey, I have a referral program, but like, how is that a funnel? How does that work? If you're terrified of paid ads, or you know, worst case, you're thinking about hiring an agency because this just feels overwhelming and stressful to you. Get with a mentor, learn how to do it, put it into practice until you're good at it, and you'll never need an agency again. I also want you to do something else. I want you to do something to make some easy cash and really help your clients. And that is a habits kickstart program. Okay. Or a high rocks training group too, by the way. I'm going to walk you through what you do for a habits training program, though, because this is very simple and your clients really need it. They need it right now, honestly, but they can really use it in January too. You can run this anytime, as many times as you want during the year. So a habits challenge is a 30-day challenge. Okay. So I can open this up if if you're in Subra and you have access to this. Um, first, here's how to build your own. And what you want to do is you want to pick like four different habits that if people just repeated over and over and over again, it would get them results. Now, if you want a popular example, think of like 75 hard, but we don't want to be hard for our clients. We want them be easy. We want it to be something that like we know they can be successful at and will improve their lives if they're consistent. So if you're in TubeBrain, just go straight here in the toolkit, healthy habits. And you know, here's all the steps. Pick your four habits. Should you make it easier or hard? Okay. What uh messages should you send to people? All that stuff. It's right in here. You can even like copy paste all of my messages and stuff too. Healthy habits challenge or how you get around all the increasing diet and nutritionist, you know, problems that are coming up in gyms. We all know that our clients need nutritional help and coaching, but it's getting harder and harder to work around being a registered dietitian. And, you know, what can you call nutrition? You can't prescribe a meal plan anymore, but habits are a great solution because it helps people get the fundamentals down. It's not called nutrition, so you're not like open to getting sued or shut down by some kind of licensing agency, and it's really profitable for both you and the coach who runs it. So that's a great one to run in January. You can also include people from outside the gym, too. So that makes it really, really, really fun. February, what I want you to do first is to evaluate your coaches and then second, do a bring a friend event. Now, something you'll notice as I go through here, I've always got like one process improvement and then one thing that you're going to do to make money. Okay. Always. And those are the two brains of business, right? It's like systemize and market. Uh, help people better, get more people in, retain people, coach the people to buy. Like those are the two brains of two-brain business. And so what I want you to do in February first is evaluate your coaches. Now, the reason that I put it down on February is because this is something that we quite often just forget to do until we're mad at them. And then it's like, oh, I'm gonna sit this guy down and I'm gonna give him these five things that I'm he's doing wrong. And you know, you know what happens when you do that, right? First, you get defensive, you're like full of anxiety the night before, like, oh, I don't want to have this confrontation. They're defensive right off the jump. It becomes this big emotional fight. And then when you want to do it again next time, they know they're in trouble, so they don't want to do it. What you need to do is set out evaluation periods in advance so that they know that it's coming. You also need to give them a copy in their contract of like, here's the evaluation form so they know how they're being measured in success for success. So here we go. If you're in two brain, you can just go to the career roadmaps and evaluation section. You can download sample, you know, evaluations for coaches, for CSMs. Here's a video of me delivering this evaluation. Okay, here you go. Everything is right there for you. But even if you don't do this, even if you're not in two brain, what you should be doing here is making up an evaluation form, giving it to your coaches in advance, and then setting dates in 2026 when that evaluation is gonna happen. Look, people actually like to be evaluated because they want to know how they're doing. They want to have a scorecard, they want to know if they're a B plus or an A, maybe a C minus in some places. I'm gonna talk to you in a minute about a career roadmap meeting, which is slightly different, but the way that you frame the evaluation really matters. And that's where a coach can help you get into this evaluation process and you know, continually build your staff up. Next is bring a friend event. And the reason that I want you to do this, you know, once a quarter or so is because the old way of like having a free trial every Saturday or free community class, that does not work for attracting new people, especially not the people you know that you want in your gym. What that works for is the gym owner who doesn't want to feel salesy and like just hopes that people will come into the gym, try the program, throw their credit card at you. That doesn't happen, right? Like in the product business, if you're Costco or Sam's Club, giving away a couple of free samples will help you sell some more chicken nuggets. There's no denying it. In the service industry, though, especially in the high value services like coaching, you can't just let people have one little taste test and think that they're gonna understand the value. You need to sit them down, have a conversation about their goals, show them the plan to get them to their goals, and then coach them to sign up. So a bring a friend event is really orchestrated. And what you're going to do here is you're going to post this once every quarter. You're going to tell your clients to bring somebody specific or bring one person. That person's going to sign up in advance. You're going to book a no-sweat intro with that person before or immediately after their bring a friend event. The event itself is not a typical workout. It's an achievement-based workout. It's super duper fun. You want to find ways that they can win. You're going to take lots of pictures of them with the whiteboard or flipping the big tire or whatever that is, swinging from the pull-up bars. You're going to make them feel like they win. And then you're going to ask them to sign up. If you just run this as like this free trial thing, you're not going to get many conversions from it. If you run it as a consultative process, you will get lots of conversions from it. And as usual, with all these things, like the details make all the difference. You can say, after listening to what I just said, you can say, Well, I know that. I already knew that. But if you're not actually doing it the right way with all the right details, it probably won't work for you. And that is what business is all about. And that's what coaching is all about, helping you define and do those little tiny details. The triple D's of coaching. Define, do the details. Okay. So the next thing we want to do after February is we're going to run an intramural open. Now, this is a big community-building event. Okay. It's not enough just to run an event and say, oh, I'm building community. Again, it's all in the details. You have to set your event up the right way. Now, this is kind of a competition, but it's really a challenge. And so you can do this with the CrossFit Open if you want to. You can do this with a HIROX challenge if you want to, or something else. Every year, I pick four workouts. I build them out myself. I test different domains of fitness. And the goal is that different people are winning all the time. The goal is not to have like one overarching leaderboard where one client gets to feel superior to everybody else. The goal is to increase participation, get people interacting, meeting new people in the gym, forming new friendships, and pushing themselves a little bit harder to hit new PRs. That's what it's all about. We've been running this since 2012 in my gym. We've been publishing a guide on the intramural open since 2013. Other people have adopted it. You'll see CrossFit talk about doing the intramural open and stuff every year. That's cool. The reason that they're adopting it is because it works. And if you're not using this, what's going to happen if you're just running the CrossFit open on your own is you get tired, right? It's extra work. You get kind of burned out. The money seems to be going to somebody else. I want you to do this in a way that gives you energy, doesn't exhaust you, and it pays you too. And it actually gives you retention benefit in your gym. So while you can use the intramural open guide and, you know, use the CrossFit workouts or high rock stuff on top, it's actually best to make your own and create an intramural event in your gym. It's up to you which way you do it. It's fine. Um, you know, the workouts are an important part, but it's maybe like 30% of the entire package. Okay. Um, in April, I want you to do 30 goal review sessions. The biggest reason the gyms fail is poor retention. It's not marketing. And the biggest rock, the biggest move, the biggest pillar of retention is goal reviews. If you're doing goal reviews, I mean, that's like 20% of the work that you could be doing, but it's going to give you 80% of the results. So start there. How do you do a goal review? Well, what you're going to do is you're going to bring people into your um, you know, your office where you did their sales meeting, basically. And you're going to say, okay, let's measure what you worked on or you wanted to work on when you came in here. So when you came in here, you had a goal, right? Lose weight, gain strength, gain flexibility, firm up, you know, whatever they said, feel better, get more energy, sleep better, de-stress, whatever their goal was. Now let's measure your progress. So you bring out your tool for measuring their progress, whether that's an in-body or a flexibility test or do some strength tests or whatever. Then you say, Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. Are you completely happy with your results? And when you ask that question, they're gonna answer one of three ways. First is yes, I'm thrilled with my results. I'm super pumped. And you'll say, Congratulations, keep doing what you're doing. I'm so proud of you. How can I get your husband, coworker, BFF into the gym? Now you should know that person by name, and this is called affinity marketing. It's a process, but that's how you grow your gym, and that's how you support your clients best by changing the people around them. Look, if you've got a woman in your gym and she's trying to lose weight or just get fit or whatever, right? Get her energy levels back, and she's going home at night, and her husband is like, Well, you're home late again. Uh, yeah, I had to make dinner again. Yeah, don't worry, I already took the pets out. And and on the weekend, it's like, oh, well, how come you got to go to the gym on the weekend too? And how come you're always going to bed at seven o'clock before Jeopardy comes on? And you know, this is pretty expensive. You know, that's all she's getting a lot of the time. And she's getting that from her coworkers, her friends, probably too. The way that you really change her life is you get those people into the gym because then the atmosphere at home, the environment at work becomes one of support instead of a drag on her. And so you want to go for the referral. The second uh thing that people could tell you in a goal review, back to the goal reviews, is yeah, you know, I do feel like I'm making some progress, but I kind of wish it was going faster. Okay. Wonderful. In your shoes, here is how I would get faster progress. I would do a one-on-one stuff once a week, or I would get a nutrition program or whatever you think. Like you're the coach, right? But the goal review gives you the opportunity to talk to people about their progress and tell them how to speed it up. And the third answer that they might give you is actually, I'm not really happy with my results. You know, I don't know if this is for me. That's also a good answer because it means they're talking to you about it instead of just ghosting. How many clients have you lost in your gym where you said, Man, I thought things were going well. I'm surprised they quit. The reason you're surprised and the reason that it feels like a breakup is because you did not have this conversation with them. So if they're sitting with you and they're telling you honestly, it's not going well, they're inviting you to tell them a better solution. Okay. Now, if you're in Tube Rain, this is all broken down for you in our goal reviews module. You just go to this, you download the goal review kit, you do some role play with your mentor to get practiced at it. Here's how you get people to come in the goal review chat flow chart. Here's the script that you use in your goal review. Okay. And then here's what you do. You make a better prescription. Here's how you break down the prescription. All of this stuff is in there for you. If you've never done a goal review, the best thing that you can do is pick your five favorite clients, sit them down, measure their progress, and say, Are you completely satisfied with your results? That's it. Okay. This is so important that this is your only task in May. And I said earlier, like, I want to give you a systems task and I want to give you a marketing task. Goal reviews are both. Goal reviews are the best retention strategy out there, they're the best ARM increasing strategy out there. And quite often they can actually lead to a referral, too. That's how important they are. And that's all I'm giving you for April because I want you to get good at them. Okay, so May, we're going to turn to um corporate marketing. Now, this is an interesting marketing strategy. This is one of those, you know, it's not a Hail Mary, but it is like a big long bomb. You're you might do a bunch of corporate reach outs or whatever. And sometimes it feels like, well, if one of 10 of these pays off, it's going to be worth it. But the reality is you don't want the corporation to sign up. You want all of its employees to sign up. So this is a better way to do it. So what you're going to do here is you're going to talk to your best clients and you're going to say, you know, you're such a great client. As a thank you to you, what if I came into your office at shift change or at lunchtime or at afternoon break? And I did a short little seminar for people on, you know, fill in the blanks, uh, nutrition, stretching, stress reduction, whatever that is, you know. And again, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to change the whole environment for our clients, but we'll probably wind up getting more clients out of it too. And so if the client is like, yeah, that's awesome, you know, wonderful. Who should I talk to in your organization? And they're going to give you a manager's name or the HR or whatever. If you've got an entrepreneur in your gym, this is just such a slam dunk. Congratulations. You know, thank you for being such a great client. I love having you here as a special thank you. What if I came into your workplace and just gave a talk to your employees about health and safety, stretching to do in the morning, stress reduction, how to eat it at the job. You know, it's a bonus to them. And what you're gonna do is you're going to go into the session, you're gonna talk for 20 minutes, you're mostly gonna do a QA, right? That's easy. And then you're gonna have people give you their email addresses to enter them in a draw. And that draw is going to be for a free whatever, in-body, no sweat intro, jug of protein powder. You're not gonna give them free personal training because you don't give away your high-value service that you charge for. You're gonna give them some kind of prize. So maybe it's a t-shirt, whatever. Afterward, you're gonna go back to your office, you're gonna draw one of those names randomly. You're gonna email all of them. Okay. Now they're on your email list, they're in the lead nurture sequence, and you email them all. Congratulations, the winner was Kathy. So amazing. Can't wait to see you. Come on in, pick up your skipping rope, whatever. The rest of them stay on your email address, right? And again, of course, at the end of that email, you're like, hey, you know, if you want to do a no-sweat intro, a catalyst, click here. That's it. That's how you do corporate marketing, right? They've given you access to like a dozen, two dozen new possible clients who are probably making a good living, the same as your client is. Then I want you to do a career roadmap session. Now, a career roadmap session is a little bit different from a staff review. So, in a career roadmap session, it's it's like a goal review for your staff. So you're gonna sit down and you're gonna start off with like, hey, you know, where do you want to go to? What kind of career do you want? You know, what do you want from working at this gym? And some of them will say, Hey, I'm good. Yeah, love it. Thank you so much. Wonderful. You go into an evaluation. Some of them will say, though, like, I want more, I would like some more hours. I'd love to make this a full-time job. And what you do in those cases is you say, Let's plot the path from here to there. So let's start with what you want to do. You want a job here. How much do you want to make? Okay, let's work backward from that. Now we have tools for that in TubeRay. Okay. So we have this whole staff ascension model. And what we give you is like, here's a spreadsheet. You can start with your target earning, and we can fill it in. Here's the opportunities in my gym. Well, you can coach this many classes. There's, you know, this much personal training, or there's these other roles that you might want to fit into short term and long term. And then you show them here's the steps that need to happen to get there. And then you say, now here's where we're starting from. And that's when you give them their evaluation. Okay, you know, you want to coach more classes uh to get there. Here's what I need to see happen. Okay. You want to take more personal training? Wonderful. Here's a certification that I need you to get, or here's you know, the steps that I need you to do or the things that I need you to improve to have that opportunity. Like that's it. That's how you do a career roadmap. It's just like a goal review for clients. But here's the thing we're in an age now where staff retention is almost as hard as client retention. Just like you've got to set up a marketing pipeline for funnels for your clients, you need to set up a recruitment pipeline for your staff. You need to always be marketing to your staff. And just like you need to have retention systems like goal reviews for your clients, you need to have retention systems like career roadmaps for your staff. I'll be honest with you here. If the owner of the studio where I was working in 2005 had sat me down and done any kind of exercise like this, even just like Chris, you know, what do you want from life? Or Chris, like, here's how we can help you make more money. I would not own a gym today. I would still be working for that guy and still doing probably one-on-one training. If he had said something like, Well, let's try doing small group, I probably would have stayed there for the next 20 years. Instead, I left, built a gym, almost went bankrupt, saved it, became the biggest gym in our city. And now here I am, you know, talking to you. So it turned out for the best. But the reality is if you want to keep your staff, like this is the kind of conversation that you need to have. Okay, back to the guide. In June of 2026, I'd really like you to come to the Two Brain Summit. Now, this is going to sound like a pitch, and it kind of is, but the reality here is that the benefits of attending summit far, far, far outweigh the investment. Yes, you're gonna learn stuff. Okay, like that's why we go to most business seminars, but the summit is so much more than that. At the summit, you're going to actually work with coaches, speakers, presenters. So when Mike Mikalowitz gets on the stage in 2026, he's not just out there to talk about the pumpkin plan or his newest book. What he's there to do is guide you through work. So there's going to be an exercise that you're going to be doing coached by Mike from the stage. And then we'll have another dozen speakers get up there and speak to you. Yes, they're inspirational. Yes, they're educational, but they're there to coach you. The next thing, and this is arguably even more important, is that the gym owner business is lonely. Like there's very few people we can talk to about this, right? I know it, I know because I am one. You don't want to talk to your spouse about it at nine o'clock at night when you're exhausted because you don't want to dump everything on them. And you can't really talk to your staff about it because it feels like whining and they're gonna lose you know confidence in the business to be able and start looking around for other things. You definitely can't talk to your clients about it. Who can you talk to about? Right? Where's your support network? Other professions have these professional conferences where you make friends and all the physicians, you know, talk to each other and learn from each other. And there's conferences for insurance brokers and dietitians. This is the biggest conference for micro gym owners in the world for a reason. We do an amazing job. The team does an amazing job. I just kind of show up and shake hands. And we're good at connecting you with other gym owners in your town, your state, or across the world. You can form a lasting network. You can stay in touch with these people for the next 30 years because I mean, you're gonna need it. You're gonna need to not feel like you're on an island out there. There's definitely days when you're gonna need an ear, and there's days when they're gonna need an ear too. And you can really play ideas off each other. It's the connection that really matters. It's the feeling that like I'm not alone out there. These people have me. I mean, I come into the summit every year, kind of beat down from the year, and I leave fired up. I mean, I generally leave the summit with the next book in mind, and I'm like writing on the flight home the next day. A lot of gym owners find this to be so true that they bring their staff to summit now. So there's two stages there's the big stage for the business, and then there's the smaller stage for the coaches. Uh, this year, Bill Parisi is going to be running a three-hour workshop on building speed. So it's not a lecture. Your coach is going to be working out and doing speed drills. And then uh Metfix is coming in and they're doing stuff with the coaches for three hours. We've got a couple more guests, too, that I can't name yet. But the coaches are doing stuff, they're learning, they love it, they're going out to dinner with you. And, you know, the team is tight, they're stoked, like they're out there ready to build your business when they leave. It's a great investment. On the other hand, if you just want time away and to be around your peers, don't bring your staff, just come on your own. I'm really harping on the sum because I think it's a really important part of the mentorship program. And even if you're not in two brain, you're welcome to come and join us. It's not going to be a big sales pitch. It's going to be really valuable to you too. I have never, ever, ever heard from a single person it wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth the trip. It wasn't worth the ticket. It's always worth it. And the best part about this is like your business space for it, but you get the benefit. All right. Now in July, we're back to business again. And you're going to be leaving the summit with like 20 things to do, five things you want to try, 10 people you got to talk to. So I'm not going to give you any more for June. But in July, here's what we're going to do we're going to start optimizing your Google SEO program. Okay. So in the last few months, I don't know if you're following AI or not, but in the last few months, there's been a lot of chatter about SEO and how relevant it actually is. And so go think back to the olden times, right? Three years ago, the olden days, when you would go on Google and you would like to look up, how do I find the right diet? What exercises should I do? Right? What's the best restaurant in my town? And Google would would list like, here's number one, here's number two, here's number three. And your goal with SEO search engine optimization was to land in like the first three, or just to get on the first page of Google. And Google is just all these links. And if you were on the first page, people would probably click on you. Well, now Google has changed. So what Google does, if you ask it a question now, is its AI called Gemini just tells you the answer. It doesn't send you out to an external site. Okay. So the Google is doing the search for you and just telling you the answer instead of saying, here's a site that might have the answer. What it does though, when you're doing that search, is it does link its sources. So people can click on that link still as part of the broader answer. Even more than that, though, all of the LLMs, the AI models, okay, so ChatGPT and Claude, you name it, they're all doing a lot of the searching now instead of people going to Google. Like 30% of all search traffic now is bots. So what does this mean? Well, SEO is actually even more important than ever. You've got to really optimize your site now because it's not a human coming there, it's a bot. And if a bot doesn't find what they're looking for right away, they are gone. That's why we update our SEO course in Two Brain every single year because SEO changes all the time, right? The algorithm used to be unpredictable. Now it's unpredictable and automatic and it's unknown. It's, you know, you've got to have certain things so that the bots can find you quickly, find the information that they're looking for without confusion, without searching, link to you, and then move on. Like SEO is more important now than ever. It's just different from what it was before. And so that's why I want you to do an SEO audit on yourself in July. Okay. Now, yeah, Google still works, right? But 30% of organic search traffic is down industry wide. You have to be prepared for this. You have to set it up. From this, too, you got to set up your Google My Business profile. And from there, we're going to change our ad copy. So you knew it was coming, but in August. You got to update your ad copy for the September surge. So here's what happens. We said from the state of the industry guy, the biggest data set in the fitness business, we said that August is when you're going to get the most leads, but you're also going to get the fewest sales. August is like the worst month in the industry for revenue, but it's also a great month for leads. Why is that? Well, think about who your clients are and what they're doing in their lives. Probably in the summertime, they're at their cottage, they're taking the kids on the last vacation, they're trying to get them ready for school. Okay. They're just enjoying their summer. But in September, the kids are back to school. They're back in their routine. They have a predictable schedule again. This is really important. People delay joining a gym until September because they want to do it when their schedule is really predictable. And so that means they're searching websites, right? They're making decisions, they're making choices, they're opting in, they're finding out information in August for the gym they plan to join in September. That means your advertising, your marketing has to be super duper good in August if you want to get them in September. So that means you have to go through your ads funnel. Okay. So here's your paid ads funnel in Two Brain. Okay. There's two different courses here. The first is the digital marketing course. This is for Facebook, uh, Instagram. The second is the Google Ads Mini course. Okay. So you set up this funnel, maybe you tweak your copy, you do that with a marketing mentor, and you know, you capture more leads. And you know, maybe this feels crazy and scary, and I don't really want to do that stuff. But the reality is that you don't want to be the only one in your town not doing it. And I often use the analogy of like, okay, maybe you don't want to run your own ads, but you need to know how to. Just like you might not ever change your own tires on the car, but you need to know how to because emergencies happen. The thing is, though, with your ads, it's like blowing a tire every single day. Stuff changes. You need to know how to be able to fix it. This is just part of the game. If you get good at ads and you're educated and you know when something's going wrong, when something's working, then you can hire an ad agency to run them for you. Most don't. But the reason most people hire ad agencies is the wrong reason, the backward reason. It's I don't know this, I don't want to know this. I would rather waste money on somebody else and just stay in the dark and never ever know and just like trust them, even though I've never met them before. Ad agencies routinely go out of business. Okay. Let that sink in. It's because they're not great at marketing. And when you're giving an ad agency money without knowing what they're spending on, your interests are not aligned. Their goal is to spend all the money, right? And they're going to tell you that it's working because they quote unquote got a bunch of leads. But how will you know? Well, how many leads did they actually get? I don't know. How many of those leads became clients? I don't know. You have to learn this stuff, or you're just going to keep throwing money away on ad agencies instead of knowing how to do it yourself and knowing like when something's actually working. So August is actually a great time to do that because things are quieter and you've got the added pressure to actually learn it and get it done because you have to, right? So August is like you should have a little bit of free time, a few, you know, fewer intros coming up, fewer leads coming in. But now you're kind of starting to worry, and that should be enough of an incentive to go out and learn how to do Facebook ads and fix this up. Hey, you don't have to figure this out. There's no book on like how to do better Facebook ads. You work with a mentor, okay? We provide you with a mentor just for this in TubeRay. You work with them, you set up your ad account, you learn how to run it, you learn how to tweak it, you learn how to test, you learn how to fix stuff. And then we just turn you loose. And if you want to book another call with the mentor to change things later, you can. You could even hire an agency that we work with to run those ads for you. But jumping straight to an agency is so backward and potentially harmful to your business that I strongly advocate that you don't do it. In September, I want you to perform 30 more client goal review sessions. Now, the key to success is not here's something different every single month of the year. I could easily give you something different to do every single month of the year. I mean, you saw our toolkit, right? There's dozens of things that you could do. The key is knowing what you should do, what's going to actually move the needle, and what you'll complete after that. Like I'm so going here. That's the key. And the other key is like you have to repeat what's working over time. So if you're just learning how to do goal reviews, you do 10, and then you never do them again, you are not going to get the benefit of them. The reason that you open a business is to get compounding benefits from doing the same things over and over and over again, right? That's why you're not an employee. The way that you get compounding benefits is you get the basics down and you repeat them and repeat them and repeat them. One of those basics is goal reviews. The more often you do goal reviews, the better you will be at them and the more benefit that you will get from them. It's not a one and done, it's not a try and see. It's you repeat it as part of your coaching platform and watch the results grow from it. Okay. So you're going to do more goal review sessions in September. In October, you're going to start your end-of-the-year promotions for packages and retail and gifts. And the reason is that I don't ever want you to have another bad November where you're kind of like, oh, geez, what am I going to do? And you're staring down the barrel of December, which is going to be worse. I want you to have a plan. So what you're going to do in October next year is set up your retail presale. Okay. Here's how to do it. If you're in Tubrain, all the materials are right here. How to sell supplements, how to sell uh, you know, swag retail, uh, how to sell t-shirts and stuff. And you want to get all that stuff set up in October so that there's cash coming in in November to bridge the gap of people saying, Oh, I got to save money for Christmas, or I'm gonna fall off track in November. I'm just gonna put my membership on hold while I pick out. That's how you plug that gap. Okay. You can set up your packages that people can buy for your clients, like your Christmas gifts. You can write the emails promoting those things. You can bolster your cash flow in November and especially December by setting all that up in October. This is how having a plan works. I don't want anybody else in the gym industry to have the same August 2009 that I had, where I was ready to, you know, give it all up, drive my truck off a cliff to collect the insurance money. I don't want that for anybody else. And the way that you avoid that is you have a plan. Next November, you're gonna hold career roadmap sessions with your coaches and you're gonna go through the annual plan for 2027. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna say, what worked really well. Let's keep that. Let's duplicate that in 2027. What could I tweak? What new thing have I learned? And where could I fit that in and add that to the plan for 2027? See, this is really what mentorship is all about. Giving you the tactics is great, forgetting the quick wins, right? But teaching you these skills of how to audit and how to upgrade is what projects businesses way up to the million dollar mark. It's repeating and making slight improvements instead of constantly replacing what you're doing all the time and just running this chaotic mess. Okay. In December next year, I want you to run a high rock simulation and have an in-house competition and party. Now, look, there's some stuff here on high rocks. You know, sneak peek if you've made it this far in the video. Two brain is working with high rocks to build materials for high rocks affiliates and including, you know, how to use high rocks for marketing, how to use high rocks for retention, how to pay your coaches to run high rocks, how to improve your ARM with high rocks, all that stuff. It's exciting. High ROX is growing really, really fast for a reason. Like right now, gyms are getting a great ROI on high ROX. And I'm not saying that because I have an incentive to promote HIROX. I'm saying that because that's what the data shows. And that's what I want for you is to follow the data. Now, what we do at Catalyst is we have something that's called a super meet in December. And a super meet is a fun little powerlifting challenge. Okay. And there's a little video here in the guide. Um, you can watch it if you want to. This is the second part of the super meet called the gift. So the super meet they have from 9 a.m. until about 1 p.m. to get a max in six different lifts. So they come in, they warm up, boop, start the clock. They got two hours to get a max snatch, clean and jerk, deadlift, back squat, standing press, and weighted pull-up. And they add all that up. They compare against last year, high five. That night, they come back and we do this thing called the gift. Now, the gift is where people in my gym donate to kids in foster care. We started doing this, I don't know, eight or nine years ago, maybe even more. And we've helped thousands of local kids. What happens is the foster care workers, they give us a list every year, no names, but like, here's a family of three. There's an eight-year-old, a five-year-old, and a three-year-old. Here are their sizes, you know, boy, boy, girl, whatever. And people in my gym say, okay, I'll take family number three, I'll take family number seven. And they go out and they buy gifts and we put a $50 limit, but like nobody sticks to that. And on the day of the super meet, they pay their entrance by bringing their gift and they set their gift in front of the door. And then we at night, we come back, we have a nice potlock, and at six o'clock, the foster care workers show up with vans and we load up all the vans and they go out and distribute all the presents. It chokes me up every year. I have to like leave the room and have a little cry. But this is how you actually use your community for the force of good. This is how you build that third place for your clients. You know, fewer and fewer of your clients go to church or belong to a club or a community group anymore. You can be that, you know, channel for them to give and for them to unite in that giving and to feel good and to have like that opportunity. Gym owners are super duper, you know, generous, like sometimes to their to their own fault. And they'll run fundraisers and GoFundMe's and special events, and they'll give up their weekends year round. It's better off to pick one big event like this when you can really do a great job, focus your community on it once, and you know, incorporate that into your annual plan a year in advance. Other people do things like they have like a winter formal for their clients, which is a lot of fun, or you know, they'll they'll run like a hope workout or a fundraiser or something else. That's great. This is the time of the year to really do it. People will love you for it. Look, here's the thing you can take my template here, okay? You can use the blank one if you want to. That's up on page one. Here we go. Page three. You can fill in your own blanks. Okay. You can scratch off the ones that I've got. I've got these basics down because these are the ones that I'm always reminding people to do goal reviews, career roadmaps, et cetera, funnel audits. And if you just follow this plan, your gym will grow. I guarantee it. Okay. Even better is to work with a mentor and make a customized plan just for you, based on your gym, your goals, et cetera. And you can get this free guide from me, as always. Just go into the gym owners United Facebook group. Okay, I'm in here. Just click on my little picture, send me a DM. Coop, can I have a copy, please, of that 2026 annual plan guide? This is it again. Okay. It's the starting line picture. And we update this every year because the mission is to help 10,000 gym owners be successful. And the way that you become successful is that you're constantly building, not replacing what you're doing with new stuff and chasing novelty, but taking what you're currently doing and improving it and improving it and improving it, repeating what you're doing 90% of the time and adding new stuff 10% of the time. And the way that you make that work even faster is to work with a mentor. That's why we have the biggest and best team of mentors in the world at TubeBrain. These are all highly qualified, paid people who can walk through this plan with you, put the right things in the right buckets, show you exactly what to do to execute, and then hold you accountable for doing it. So this doesn't just wind up on the bottom of a pile on your desk somewhere. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And if you want to be a better gym in 2026 than you were in 25, you just got to make a plan.