Simple Questions That Will Improve Every Single Metric in Your Gym

You won’t build a successful gym by guessing what people want. You just can't read minds—but every entrepreneur tries to do that, and it's costly.

Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper provides the simple fix: Start using the “just ask method"—a proven way to boost every single metric in your gym.

Chris walks through exactly which questions you must ask to improve your gym’s marketing, sales, retention, pricing, ROI on expenses, staff development and net owner benefit.

The key insight: Don't guess; just ask.

For example, you might assume clients want a kettlebell class because you love kettlebells. If you meet with clients and ask what they want, you might discover 10 of them are training for running events, and you have a prime opportunity to boost average revenue per member with a race prep program.

Or perhaps you can't hold onto staff people. What if you ask what they want to earn and accomplish, then show them how to do it? They'll stay longer and allow you to focus on building the business as the CEO.

Watch to discover the questions top gym owners ask to improve every key performance indicator and build incredibly profitable businesses.

Get Coop’s “Exactly What to Say” guide in Gym Owners United, linked below.

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Gym Owners United

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0:01 - Stop guessing & just ask

5:17 - Improve your marketing & sales

13:25 - Boost client retention & value

17:53 - Cut expenses & pay yourself more

25:13 - Payoff of the “just ask” method

Transcript

Chris: 0:02

You are not good at guessing what other people want. Nobody is. When I opened up my first gym, I had this huge pirate flag hanging in the corner. It was all cinder block. I painted chalkboard with chalkboard paint right on top of the cinder block. We had loud music. I think it was the Metallica Black album on repeat. Kind of an angry vibe. There was chalk bowls and stuff, but no other decoration. And I thought that I would attract people like me. That's what I wanted. But, you know, I was this broke power lifter. And so I attracted broke power lifters, angry people who scared off the better clients. Because I guessed at what people would actually want by thinking about what I want. The reality is that most businesses fail because the owner never stops to ask what their clients or their staff or anybody else actually wants. They make projection problems. And today I'm going to teach you how to get around this problem and save your business with the just ask method. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And I'm going to be referring to some tools that we give away for free in gymownersunited.com. Throughout this podcast, I'll be talking about specific questions that you can get in my guide about what exactly to say to leads, to current clients, to your staff that will help you actually build a better business instead of just whatever your first best guess is in your head. I want to start with the projection problem. See, most gym owners project their own mindset onto clients, not just their own picture. They project things like, oh, that person can't afford my service without a discount, right? They project their own wallet, a broke gym owner, onto everybody they need. But their clients are not other broke gym owners. So they need to stop doing that. Or they project what attracts them, like posting ripped hands or posting about their PRs or posting shirt pictures of them shirtless. While their clients are not thinking about that. Their clients are thinking about what do I get for dinner? Or like, how am I going to get these kids to do their damn homework? Or, you know, I got to remember to get dog food at the grocery store. You know, here's a crazy story. We used to offer people a free catalyst hat if they threw up during their first workout because we thought that was awesome. We thought it was kind of funny and it promoted intensity, but that actually scared my clients off, right? Don't worry, uh, all these projection mistakes that I'm talking about, I've done worse, right? So I hope you get a laugh out of my mistakes, but you also learn from them too. Uh, another thing that owners do is they obsess about like the drama in their gym and the culture and they try to control every little thing because the gym is their life, but it's not their client's life and it's not their staff life. So when a coach quits, the gym owner loses sleep. Oh my God, the clients are gonna be talking about this. No, they're not. Like they're worried about the drama in their own life or oh, that person stinks in my class. Whatever. The clients are probably not talking about that after class, right? A great quote on this that I had to learn early on was you worry, you wouldn't worry about what other people think about you if you realized how infrequently they actually do. That's right, when they leave the gym, they're not thinking about the gym. Okay. The next thing is I need to talk more about my method, about my my CrossFit or my certifications in Pilates or my masters in yoga, or I need to talk about politics. You know, clients don't care about that. You can't win clients talking about your method or your politics or your certifications. You can only lose them. Why don't they care? Because they got their own problems. And so, you know, if you're talking about your certifications, what you're trying to do is sell a drill bit instead of selling a solution to their problems, which is how do I hang this picture on my wall? Okay. That's a common marketing analogy. If you don't get it, basically you need to solve solutions to people's problems instead of the features that you care about, the certifications, the technique, how many other coaches you've mentored. Nobody else cares about that except for you. It will not attract clients, it will possibly turn them off. And frankly, you're wasting time and space and their attention by talking about that junk. So let's talk about how to talk about what people actually care about. And that starts with just asking. Look, I know you're surprised when people can't read your mind, because I'm surprised when nobody can read my mind. But the reality is that when somebody thinks, hey, I know what people want, and they give us bad service at their restaurant or their car dealership, we're surprised because can't they read our minds? Well, of course they can't, right? We're doing the same thing in reverse. We need to stop projecting what we think people want and just ask. And so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna go metric by metric in your business, and I'm gonna give you an example of exactly what to say, what question to ask to help you grow. Okay. So we're gonna go through uh how to use the just ask method in marketing. We're gonna use it for sales, we're gonna use it for staff, we're gonna use it for our current clients to help with retention. We're gonna be using it for ourselves too at the end. So we're gonna go through this step by step. I'm gonna share what question to ask and how it helped me for each individual metric. Okay, let's actually start with marketing. To really market well, it's not like doing art. You're not guessing and just putting messages out there and trying to figure out what'll land with people. What you actually have to do is identify who your best clients are and then duplicate them. So I'm gonna give you a quick exercise that we call the pumpkin plan. This comes from Mike Mikalowitz. I've talked about it before on the show, but it's worth repeating about once a year, once every two years at the outside. Take a blank sheet of paper, draw a vertical line down the middle. On the left hand side of the line, I want you to draw a smiley face. On the right hand side, I want you to draw a dollar sign. And then I want you to pull up your client list. Okay, just hit pause while you do that. Grab your pen. We're gonna work on this right now. Once you've got your client list in front of you, what I want you to do is look at the left-hand side of your page. It's got that smiley face on it. I want you to go down your client list and say, who are the clients who actually feed me with energy? They make me happy. I'm not just like, okay, content coaching them. They actually show up and I get energy from them being in my group or meeting them for an appointment or coaching them. Okay. They they have batteries included and more than enough energy, and it actually overflows and feeds you with energy too. Okay. Write these names down. You might have three, you might have seven, you might have 10, you might have five. I usually get about six. Okay. Then you're gonna turn to the other column, the dollar sign column, and look at your member list again and say, which of these clients pay me the most money? So just go month by month. Like, what are the what is this person paying per month? You know, are they paying for three other people? Great. Are they taking our highest value service? Great. Like write them down. And again, you might get five, six, seven people on this list. You can do your top 10 if you want to, it doesn't matter. When you've done that, I want you to compare your two lists, okay? Your happy list and your dollars list, and look for the names that appear on both. So if Sally shows up on only the happy list, okay, that's great, but we'll leave her off this exercise. If Billy shows up on the happy list and the dollars list, aha, let's circle Billy's name. We're gonna come back to him and then keep going down your list and looking for other matching names. Here's what's magical about this quite often you'll find that the people who appear on one list appear on both, right? And so you're gonna come up with three to four names of people who appear on both the happy and the dollars list. Let's go back to Billy. What we want to do is take Billy for a coffee. Like get him out of the gym, get him out of that context, just take him for a coffee, have a conversation for 20 minutes, and work some questions into the conversation. So the first question is what brought you to my gym in the first place? Okay. And you're gonna write down his answer. And the reason we're asking Billy this is we want to know what method of our marketing is working to attract people like Billy. We want to double down on that, right? Stop wasting time on the other stuff and just do what's working to attract the billies out there. Okay. Second, what else had you tried before you joined my gym? We want to know where to look for more billies. Well, I was at, you know, good life, the YMCA. I was doing metabolic fit body boot camp. Then I decided to try F-45, or I was doing CrossFit, and then I decided to try Hyrux, whatever. We want to know where to look to find more billies because that's where we're going to target our advertising and our marketing later. And third, Billy, what is the biggest challenge in your life after you leave the gym? And what we're really asking here is how can we increase our value to Billy? So if he says something like, Well, you know, I work out really, really hard, but I think I just have trouble like staying on my diet. Great. You know, we can offer a habits challenge or something. We know that like Billy is all in on this stuff. He's going to buy more stuff if we offer him better solutions and we can change his life faster. So then, you know, what we've got here is what attracted Billy to our gym. Let's do more of that. But where did Billy come from? Let's target our marketing there. And what else can we do to serve Billy better? We can increase our ARM. Now, the first time I did this exercise in my gym, I was still running with the, you know, the pirate flag in the corner and I had the skull and crossbones on my website, all of that. And we were a big CrossFit gym. And what I thought was if I ask people these questions, I know what they're gonna say. They're gonna say, CrossFit is fun. It feels like a game. They're gonna say, I challenge myself to be better every single day. The gym is my family. I love it here, and I will never leave. Uh, you know, and and also I want to go to the CrossFit games. I want to compete. And when I sat down with my three best clients, they didn't say anything like that. That was all in my head. It was what I wanted, and I was projecting onto other people. You want to know what they really said? Um, this is the only time of the day when somebody says you're doing it right. Whoa, very different, right? Um, this is the only place where people remember my name. Record scratch. What? And then finally, hey, no matter whether I have a good day or a bad day in the gym, it makes the rest of my day better. Okay, you know, I can definitely get behind that, but none of these are what I was predicting my clients would say. And so none of them reflected what I was doing for marketing. I totally changed my website. I changed everything that I possibly could do, and I started to get more people just like my best clients. I turned those top three into my top 30. Gradually, you know, some of the lower value clients started to fade away. Hey, how come we're not competing anymore? How come there's no more open gym? How come the programming doesn't have muscle ups and, you know, uh full snatches anymore? Because my best clients don't care about that. And so this helped me dial in my marketing and it actually changed my gym culture for the better, too. But that was just a side benefit. Now let's go to sales. What to ask to improve your sales instead of just guessing? The method that we're going to use here is called the prescriptive model. But the prescriptive model is about telling people what to do and then following up with a question so that they feel like they have some agency, some choice, some control. So here's what we're gonna do. The person sits down, you ask about their goals. What do you want to accomplish? Or just even what brought you in? Let them talk. Most of this is listening, right? The just ask model requires you to sit and listen and then say, okay, well, based on your goals, here's what I would recommend. You make a prescription because you're a professional. You don't just try to sell them your kettlebell class. Okay. They are not out there searching the internet for ways to kettlebell better. They are searching the internet for ways to lose weight, to feel better, to loosen up their tight back, to undo the damage at work, whatever. But they are not Googling best kettlebell class for community. That's just in your head. So after you've made your prescription, you say, okay, based on what you like to accomplish, I think we can help you. You need to be here four times a week. Okay, that's it. You say, here's the prescription. And I need you to follow a healthy habits eating plan or whatever your prescription is. You're the coach. Then you say, now, would you prefer to do this in a small group setting, or would you be more comfortable doing this one-on-one with me? Just because I like training in a group doesn't mean that's for everybody. And what you'll find is that about 10% of people will say, let's start one-on-one. The people who want to start in the group, you know, you can guide them toward your on-ramp program to start and then ask again at the end of on-ramp because people change. This is what's really important here. You need to be giving people choices within frameworks. So here are three options, which one do you pick? Not what do you want to do or what membership do you want to sign up for? Okay. Solve their problems. That determines the framework, right? The scope of how you're going to help them, and then give them three options, no more. Less is okay, two options is fine within that framework. Okay. You're giving them choices, you're giving them agency, but you're still keeping them on the path. That's how you sell more valuable services by selling people what they actually need based on your prescription first and then a little bit of choice. Now let's talk about retention. How do you improve retention with the just ask model? Well, you bring people in for a goal review. And so every three to six months, every single client, at least in your group training program, should be coming in to sit down in front of you. You measure the thing that they care about. Okay. Maybe that's like achieving black belt status in the back squat. Maybe. Maybe it's fat loss, right? You need to know what they care about first and measure that thing over time. Then you ask, are you completely happy with your results? Now they're going to answer one of three ways. The first answer is, yes, I'm completely happy. And if they do, you say, Hi five, you're doing amazing. Keep coming to class. And by the way, I've got my camera here. Would you please share a message for the next client to help encourage them to do what you've done? Okay. If they say, kinda, I'm happy, but I wish it was coming faster. I'm happy with my strength gains, but I wish I was losing weight. I'm happy with my weight loss, but I'm not getting any stronger. If there's a maybe in there, we have an opportunity to make them a new prescription. Okay, if I were in your shoes and I wanted to speed up my results, here's what I would do. How does that sound? You make a new prescription. You just update their prescription a little bit. This is gonna feel like an upsell, but remember the person is happy. They just want more. And so you're gonna give them more. The third thing they might say is, no, I am not happy with my results. And this is actually not a bad answer either, because they're telling you they're unhappy instead of leaving and letting you guess. So the just ask model works, even if it gives you an answer that you don't really want to hear. So what you'll say is like, okay, if I were in your shoes, here's what I would do differently. And you give them a new prescription. Then you ask, how does that sound to you? And most of the time they will continue with their gym because it's better than starting over with a new coach or going out there into the wilderness and trying to figure it out on their own again. You know, despite what Men's Health magazine said in August 2025, people don't want to mix and match and go to five different gyms and try to figure it out. They want you to tell them the answer. But to tell them the right answer, you have to ask them the question first. The next metric that we can apply the just ask model to is ARM, average revenue per member. And in this method, we don't guess what people want. We don't guess at add-ons or perks or offers. This is the big problem that a lot of owner operator gyms have. They think my people want more open gym time. I'm just gonna add that. But not everybody wants that. And that means that not everybody will value it. Or, hey, my people want to do more gymnastics. I'm gonna run a gymnastics class Tuesday night at 7 p.m. And I'll get rid of like the CrossFit class or whatever at that time, and I'll just run that class. And this was really, really common, you know, 2015-ish. But the problem is that not everybody wants that gymnastics class. And the people who wanted the CrossFit class at seven, they don't want to come to gymnastics now that they've lost a class. You know, you can apply HYROCs in this example right now. This is really common. I got to take away my Saturday classes and just do high ROCs. Cool. But your 100 members didn't sign up for that HIROCs class. They signed up to do a regular kettlebell class or whatever it is on Saturday mornings. Um, so you're actually taking things away. What you're better to do is offer that class for people who want it at an increased price, at a separate price. Okay. You need to use goal review data to identify what people want more of, if that's performance like high rocks. Or you can also do a hand raising post uh to determine do I need a specialty group for kids or for seniors, right? So you could say, hey, who's looking for something for their kids this summer? And if you get a lot of hands raised, you offer a kids program for the summer. Or you could say, who has a parent whose health they're kind of concerned about? And if you get a lot of responses, then you offer a legends program for six weeks. You don't commit long term to putting that on your schedule or bumping anything else. You do a one-time group, you fire a bullet before you fire the big cannonball, you test it. And then that will tell you what people actually want. First, you ask them, and then you ask them to prove it by offering this thing at a separate price. And if they want it, they'll answer by proving it with their wallets, by buying it. The next place that you can use the ask method is in your expenses. And we call this ROI. See, every expense that you commit to, your software, your lease, your equipment loan, your staff pay, you did that for a reason. And you did that to give yourself entrepreneurial leverage. You started a business to get some leverage on your life. So you're not just trading time for money. That's great. You rented this location because it would give you the best leverage to get the best possible business for you and your family. You signed up for that software because you thought it would give you some leverage on marketing. And you signed up for that bookkeeper because you thought she would give you the best leverage on not going to jail for not paying your taxes. You're always buying leverage and you should get a good return on that investment. You signed up with Two Brain to get a good return on investment from mentorship. You can pay something up front for a year or two and get results back for the next 30 years that will pay off and snowball and snowball to the point where you can't even count the returns anymore. Instead of cutting any investments, oh man, this was a bad month. I'm gonna stop my marketing, cut my ad spend, I'm gonna, you know, put my mentorship on hold. That I'm gonna stop doing the marketing. You stop doing the things that actually grow you. Instead of cutting things, just pause and ask, how can I get a better return on this investment? No, you don't even have to figure that out for yourself. You can go to your bookkeeper and say, How can I get a better return on our time together? You can go to your mentor and say, How can I get a better return on revenue this month, or how can I focus on more clients this month, or how can I improve my retention this month? You can always ask. And whoever the service provider is would rather you just ask that question than quit and leave them to guess. Okay. If you're uh talking to your landlord and you're saying, like, hey, you know, it's been a rough month, how can I get a better return on this investment? They will probably have better ideas than you do. They might say something like, oh boy, I can't risk losing this tenant. Maybe we can cut off 300 square feet, or maybe you can sublet 300 square feet to a massage therapist, or maybe I can let you have access to the parking lot on the weekends, or et cetera. They're not going to cut the price for you, but they are gonna help you get a better return on that investment. Okay. So, you know, I do this every single year. Now that I know this trick, I go to my accountant every year. How can I get a better return on my investment? Well, Chris, I can give you a better dashboard to tell you how you're doing day to day. Wonderful. This year, my accountant said, let's bring the bookkeeping in-house. That way it streamlines it and it'll save you a few bucks. Perfect. Great. I went to my attorney. How can I get a better return on this investment? He said, Stop using Chat GPTs to work out your lease agreements in advance. What I can do is set you up a lease template and you can just plug future names and dates into it. Great. Like this cost me a little bit of money up front, but I can use this 30 times in the next decade, right? So these the service providers have better ideas than you do. Oh, here's a great one. I went to my software company and I said, How can I get a better return on this investment? And they said, Chris, give us a list of all the software platforms you're using. Well, there was Zen Plan or Beyond the Whiteboard, uh, there, you know, this whole list, right? I had a whole bunch. You know, I'm using this for my website. And they said, Well, Chris, you know, kilo can do all of that. So wait a minute. I got my website, I got my CRM, which I was paying for separately. I've got my booking and billing, which I was paying for separately. And when they ever add wad tracking, I can put all that into an all-in-one. You know, this is why I love kilo, by the way. Usually when somebody is selling an all-in-one, it means that they are best at none, right? They they have wad tracking and they have billing, but neither is like the best. And they're just kind of like combining it and you're looking at this to save money. You actually have to say, is this going to give me a better return on my investment? And when I started with kilo, they were still GLM, I said, How can I get a better return on this investment? And they said, well, package the CRM with the website and then just track leads, and that'll tell you what your return is. And boom, in the first month, it was like a 3x return on investment. The more money I put into the system, the more money I got back out. And I said, This is a money machine. Like, I'm gonna keep doing this. Now, I don't own kilo, by the way. So this take this for what it's worth. Um, but you know, this is my testimonial for them, I guess. The next metric we want to talk about is effectively effective hourly rate. Like, how can we use the just ask method to improve our staff retention and our staff performance and our staff ascension? We want them to build careers. Well, the question you're gonna ask your staff is what do you want most now? So when you hire them, they might have wanted to trade their membership against some time, right? But maybe that's changed now. Or maybe the work situation outside that you don't even know about has changed and they want to go full-time in your gym. Or maybe they are full-time in your gym and they want to go halftime so they can work on social media or something else. The key is that just like you do goal reviews with your clients, you have to do a career roadmap meeting with your staff every three to six months and start with what do you want from life and how has that changed? What do you want now? Okay. And just like your clients, you want to know what's changing for your staff so that you can help guide them to getting what they want through your business or help guide them out instead of just, hey, I took a new job across the country, I'm leaving Monday. You need to be in control of your staff journey just like you are of your client journey by creating opportunities, not just by giving them a raise, but showing them how to earn more money, guiding them, coaching them, mentoring just like you're coaching and mentoring your clients. All right. Last question. Use the just ask method on yourself. And I want you to ask yourself at least once a year, what does my perfect day look like? The reason you have to do this, just like you have to keep asking your staff this, while you have to keep doing the pumpkin plan on your clients, is because your perfect day will change. My perfect day as a 30-year-old involved a two-hour workout in the middle of the day. It involved tracking my metrics on, you know, the back squat, the clean, how many double honors I could do, winning workouts, uh, showing up and competing at different throwdowns and stuff. Now, as a 49-year-old, my perfect day looks nothing like that. My perfect day starts with my golden hour now. It uh progresses to taking my dog outside at 7 a.m. It moves on to making content to help other gym owners like this. It means training at 9 a.m. on my bike, regardless of the weather, et cetera, and finishing up usually around two in the afternoon. That evolves over time and you need to constantly ask yourself, what's my perfect day now? Because once you have that, the next logical question is easier. You can say, okay, how much money do I need to earn to provide that perfect day for myself and my family? And that will give you a clear net owner benefit target that you can build your business around delivering. If you don't know how to do that, of course, your mentor will help you. All right. These are the just ask method questions for improving every single metric in your business, stopping the guessing, stopping getting the wrong answers, stopping stubbing your toe on your business and growing to hate it because it feels like you're always wrong. Stop being wrong by stopping the guesswork and just asking people. Here's the payoff. None of us can read anybody else's mind. And when we try to guess about marketing, about what our clients want, about retention, it creates wasted time, wasted money, and wasted opportunities. And this is so frustrating because it feels like you're just wrong all the time, like you're stubbing your toe and you're fighting your business, that it often leads people to quit. They feel like I'm just wrong. I don't know, I don't get it. And they throw their hands up in the air and they lose hope. Guessing produces this wasted time, wasted money, and wasted opportunities. The way around this is just to ask. Lower yourself, you know, humble yourself and just ask people. This will produce clarity, it'll produce better service, happier clients and more profitable gyms. The key is that you've got to get over yourself. You've got to approach this with humility and just ask people. So if you want some help with this, you can download my exactly what to say guide at gymownersunited.com. Just ask me for it and I'm happy to give it to you. Send me a DM, ask me advice. What should I say in this situation? What should I say in that situation? You'll be talking to a human here. Hello, not a robot or some kind of chatbot. And if you want a copy of this guide, I'm happy to give it to you. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And hey, if you want more help, just ask.