Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief: Leadership for Gym Growth

Why do most gyms plateau at 122 members? The answer: leadership.

In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," Two-Brain CEO Chris Cooper explains how your leadership skills determine whether your gym grows, stalls or shrinks.

Your gym will rise to the level of your leadership and fall to the level of your worst staff members. To take your gym to increasingly higher levels, you must evolve as a leader.

Chris presents the four phases of leadership for gym owners and lists the skills required to climb the ladder:

✅ Founder—Master self-leadership with focus and discipline.
✅ Farmer—Build team leadership through clarity and systemized delegation.
✅ Tinker—Develop peer leadership by collaborating and mentoring.
✅ Chief—Become a better storyteller and improve your ability to create and inspire new leaders.

To avoid outpacing your leadership development, Chris recommends you build your gym business plan with 150 members as your first target—not 300. If you try to go big too soon, you'll always slide back to 120-150 members.

But if you learn to serve 150 people in a rock-solid business and develop your CEO skills, you can acquire as many members as you want or move on to the next legacy-building project.

Watch this episode to get clarity on your current leadership phase and learn exactly which skills you need to break through to the next level.

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2:17 - Why gyms plateau at 122 members

9:02 - Founder: self-leadership

11:35 - Farmer: team leadership

14:43 - Tinker: peer leadership

18:20 - Chief: tribe leadership

Transcript

Chris 0:02

The average gym has 122 members. Why isn't that number more? Why isn't it 150? Why isn't it 300? Well, it's usually the limits of its leader. The leader is what's creating that glass ceiling that stops the gym from growing further. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to talk about the glass ceiling effect, how to break through it, what you need to do to take your gym to the next level, and also how to build a business around 150 clients and why that's important. I want to start off with leadership as the critical limiter or accelerator in gym growth. We're going to start off with Dunbar's number. So Dunbar was a researcher, an anthropologist who studied tribes and studied the way that humans organize ourselves into groups. And this number, 150, kept coming up over and over and over. Wherever he went in the world and whatever society that he looked at, people tend to organize in groups of about 150. And when the group becomes larger than that, the groups tend to break off and start another tribe or grow. Of course, there can be a loose affiliation between tribes and there can be an entire nation's built on tribes, but in general, a tribe grows to about 150 people because that is the cognitive limit of its leader. The number of stable relationships that you have, you know, the number of people that you would think about sending a card to on their birthday, the number of people whose spouse's name, whose pet's name you can remember, about whom you remember a little story, is usually about 150. Might be slightly more, 170, might be slightly less, like 130. But even if you're a real people person, that number is not going to be, you know, 200 or 250 or a thousand. And this is actually what limits the growth of most gyms, because the people who come in there have some kind of loose affiliation with the owner. And if the owner is maxed out from the number of relationships that they can maintain in their brain, well, that's when people start to drop away. This doesn't mean that you, as the owner, have to have a relationship with every client in your gym. But if you don't think like, hey, whatever happened to Jim, you know, then nobody is probably thinking about that. Of course, you can bust through this cap with staff and systems. And I'm going to talk about all of that today. First, most gyms have about 122 members. That's straight from the state-of-the-industry data. The biggest research study published in the entire fitness industry comes from us. Every single year, we work with partners like Wattify and Kilo and from our own data. And we look at the numbers across about 15,000 gyms. And the median for coaching gyms, micro gyms, is about 122 members. That means it's kind of crazy to build your business plan on getting 300 members someday. And really, if you build a business plan around 150 members, what you'll build is this sustainable and replicable business that you can copy over and over and over and over again. But why is it that number? Why is it 122 and not 222 or 1022? Well, it's usually because leadership skills, systems, and delegations hit their ceiling at that point. Not only can you only remember 150 different relationships, but usually you can only manage the people who manage those relationships too. All right. So let's let's get into that first. Why do gyms plateau at 122? Well, meaningful relationships are more than you know Facebook friends, right? I have 5,000 Facebook friends, and sometimes I have to like drop Facebook friends. If we're Facebook friends, hi, but that doesn't mean that we have a meaningful relationship where I know a lot about you and you know a lot about me, and we're going to stop and chat at a kid's baseball game. That's not what this is. Our brains are pretty much limited to about 150 close relationships. And your business will only rise to the limit of your leadership or fall to the limit of your worst staff. How do you get more than 150 clients? Well, by delegating solid relationships between your staff and the client, or the client and the client, or the story and the client. These are different levels of leadership that require different skill sets. And I'm going to break those down for you. Quite often, though, why this is important to you, I get on hundreds of chats with gym owners every single year. And quite often they'll say something like, Coop, um, you know, we get up to 120 members and then we fall back to 100. We get to 150 and we drop to 130. We get to 100 and we drop to 80. And they just kind of stay there, like they're bumping a ceiling and they just can't bust through it and they can't figure it out. And I ask them certain questions, and it turns out it's not their marketing, it's not their retention, it's not their programming by any means. It's not the certifications that their coaches have or how nice the owner is. It's their leadership that forms that glass ceiling. Let's start by talking about two posts that I wrote a few years ago about that glass ceiling. So, first, what I said was that uh in this link, start with 150. If you build your business plan around getting 150 members and you set your prices based on the assumption that you're gonna work with about 150 members, and you hire based on that, and you choose your lease based on that, and you buy the equipment based on 150 members, the worst thing that happens is that you exceed that and you have to buy more equipment or get a bigger space. But the gyms that start out with the assumption that they're gonna get more than 150 members usually run into early trouble. They take out more space than they're ever gonna need. They'll never be able to fill it and they buy more equipment and they overhire and they bring on all these expenses. And so three years down the track, when their lease comes due, they're not making any money and they're like, eh, I forgot, forget it. It's not gonna work. And they'll blame something like the market or the Facebook ads don't work or the competition, or you know, I got bad culture, I got a bad coach, I'm not certified enough, nobody wants to work, whatever. Those are all fake. The reality is that they jumped too far into a model that isn't never gonna work, and that they just assumed would. They made a bad guess, one bad guess. Instead, if you build your whole model and your pricing and your marketing and your program offerings around getting 150 members, and you work backward from there to say, how can I earn, you know, $100,000 a year as the owner, employ a full-time coach and one halftime coach with 150 members, that will guide you into setting your prices, buying your equipment, taking out your lease, et cetera. Worst case, you exceed that and you then have to expand. But that's not normal. That doesn't happen by accident. It's like somebody saying, I don't want to do your workout because they're gonna gain too much muscle. Like that's not just going to happen by accident. What you should do is start with a plan to make 250. Once you do that, it requires a different level of leadership and skills and systems to get to 250 and a different level to get to 350. There are a lot of gyms out there in the functional fitness space, especially, who have zipped up to 300 clients and thought, like, I'm good at business, I'm a good leader. And they even started maybe telling other gym owners how to do their thing. And then they dropped down to 200 and then they drop down to 100. And it turns out that they were benefiting from, you know, some accident. The market was good, their location was good, whatever. And as soon as one little thing comes along, the rent goes up, 30 clients leave, a new gym opens down the road, like they're out of business because their leadership skills just weren't a match for how many clients they had. And so they fall back down. So maybe they feel like they blasted right through that glass ceiling and then they come crashing back down again. What I'm talking about is building a sustainable model that's going to last you 20 or 30 years. You do that with about 150 members. So if you want to grow past that 150, now you need more than a great personality and more than a great relationship. You don't need just whiteboard chatter, and it's not about the programming anymore. Now you need systems delegation and leadership evolution, not just better marketing or better attention or better coaching or whatever you know trick is being sold out there. This is the glass ceiling. And the glass ceiling is leadership. And the the businesses that ignore growing the leader eventually stall. My friend Aaron, who works with uh autobody shops, has this phrase that he has up all over his HQ, all over his t-shirts, and it's fix the owner, fix the business. If you're in this boat and you're wondering, like, hey, I keep doing different marketing things and my business grows to this level and falls, and I never seem to get past 120. It's you. Look in the mirror. It's the leader's problem. So let's talk about now the skills that you need, because the skills that you need as a leader evolve. You need different leadership skills at different levels. We break the entrepreneur's journey into four phases. There's founder phase, startup, farmer phase, when you're starting to employ other people, tinker phase, when you've got a working system and you're reinvesting or scaling. And then chief phase, when you're building other leaders. And you need different leadership skills in each one. Let's start with founder. First, you need self-leadership skills. That means you have to be able to work hard. You have to be able to focus. You have to have self-discipline. You have to have perspective. Like, oh man, I'm running out of time. I got one hour. Do I go do my workout or do I finish this marketing? You know, I've I got an hour that I can fill. Do I sleep in or do I take another client? Like in the founder phase, when you're just trying to get to break even and you're just trying to get the rent paid and you're trying to survive, you need discipline. You need resilience. You're going to be working some long hours. You need focus. A lot of people stay in founder phase working really, really hard for years and they just burn out because they can't focus. They're doing a lot, but they're not focused on the right things. And so, you know, what are they doing? Well, they're getting up at 5 a.m. and they're mopping the floor, and then they're greeting the first class and they're coaching until nine, and then they got to work out themselves. So they work out for two hours and then they got to do the programming. And then, you know, maybe they might return phone calls or whatever. And at nine at night, they've been busy all day, but their business hasn't grown. Focus means that they can set aside an hour every single day to grow the business. That's how you get out of founder phase and the hustle and grind culture really, really quickly. The other thing that you need in founder phase is you need the discipline to avoid shiny object syndrome and emotional volatility. You know, one thing that kept me in founder phase was when I'm tired, I am kind of cranky and I have trouble hiding it. And so one time, you know, this client named Patty, she's an amazing woman. She was doing personal training with me. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. The gym was hot. I was exhausted. I'd been there for almost 12 hours. I had another five hours ahead of me. And she's like, I just can't get motivated to do my homework. And I said to her, get this, that's not my problem. Can you imagine saying that to somebody who is coming to you for personal training and they've had a horrible day and they're at the gym to blow off steam, have a meaningful conversation, hear you're doing a good job, get a high five. And that person says, That's not my problem. I mean, she left and never came back. And she was right to. So in the founder phase, you have to build the self-leadership skills of being emotionally resilient. You have to be able to avoid shiny object syndrome. That's another Achilles heel for me. Uh, you have to be able to focus, you have to have discipline and work capacity. And I recommend using the golden hour strategy to maximize your output. Even though it feels like you've got a million things to do, taking the first hour of your day and doing one thing to grow your business before you start putting out all those other fires, that's what gets you out of founder phase quickly. In farmer phase, you're starting to hire a team and hopefully you're stable enough that you're not taking a big risk by hiring this team. Hopefully you've got at least 50 clients on your own and you're not just hiring like 12 volunteers or trading memberships with them. At this point, you need to learn how to lead other people. And I think that you need to learn how to lead yourself because, you know, if you're unfocused or undisciplined or you can't work hard or you're emotionally volatile, good luck leading other people. That said, you know, of course, the first decade of my career, I had all those problems and I was trying to lead other people anyway. Luckily, you know, enough of them stuck around long enough to make the business successful. But in the farmer phase, you are working beyond your own physical capacity. And that means that you have to leverage other humans to replicate your results. That means you have to be good at delegation. That means you have to get instructions out of your head and onto paper so that you're telling them exactly what to do. That means you have to evaluate them frequently so that they know how they're doing and they're not just guessing out there. It means that your systems have to be absolutely clear so they're not trying to read your mind or guess what you're doing. Yes, culture is important. Yes, putting a happy face and creating a positive work environment is important and creating opportunities for people is important. But the foundation of all of that is clarity. And that means telling them exactly what to do, telling them how they're doing at it, and then asking, do you want other opportunities? If you're not being clear with people, you're not good at team leadership. In the farmer phase, we recommend a strategy called the value ladder. And what this means is hiring people at the lowest possible pay grade, not holding money back, but holding the least expensive role or hiring the least expensive roles first. So you're going to hire a cleaner, for example, before you hire another coach. And while that cleaner is cleaning, you work higher up on the value ladder. You do marketing stuff. And then, you know, when the marketing is going along well and you're making more money, now you hire another coach and you buy back another hour of your time and you work on sales. And then, you know, as eventually as you climb the value ladder, you're going to get to the point where you have staff who can pretty much do everything in your gym. You're doing exactly what you want. And now you're going to ascend to this next level, which we call tinker. And you're going to start thinking about the future. You're going to start reinvesting your profit. You're going to think about scale and opening up other gyms or growing uh beyond 150 members, which takes like a management layer. So using the value ladder is really how you master team leadership. But the foundation, the thing that you're going to set the ladder on, the wall that you're propping it against is clarity. And that's really, really important. If you're not doing that now, start. Like that's the first step this weekend. If you got hit by a bus today, there better be a book somewhere, you know, online or printed, that your team can open up tomorrow and say, here's how to run the business. Every single thing. Here's how to make a sale, here's how to post on social media, here's how to run a class on time, here's exactly what to do. We don't know when Coop's coming back, uh, but we do know how to run his gym without him. Okay. The third phase of entrepreneurship is Tinker. So we had founder phase, we had farmer phase, we had Tinker Phase. And Tinker is really about collaboration. Now you might call this peer leadership. And what you're trying to do here is be kind of like the leading peer, the person who pulls everybody together, being the connector, being the one who says, Hey, if we work together on this, we can build something bigger than the sum of its parts. And so this might look like partnerships. So you approach a bridal shop, you know, and we did this years ago. Hey, um, what if we put together an eight-week boot camp for bridal parties who come into your shop, you know, just for them. This might be collaborating or um allowing your staff to build on your platform. We call that entrepreneurship. So, hey, I've got this great idea for a new program. I really want to focus on building a kids' program. Wonderful. I've got this platform of adults. I'm not interested in building a kids program. Here's the opportunity. Here's your responsibilities. Here's what I will provide. Here's how we'll split revenue. That's entrepreneurship. They get to feel like they're building their own business, but you're already giving them a stable audience. You're already sheltering them from all the stuff, you know what I'm talking about, the bank fees and the insurance and buying the equipment and renting their own space. Like you're really making it easy for them. But they do get to feel a little bit entrepreneurial for the right person. It might mean building partnerships with government. It might mean building partnerships with other gym owners. I mean, in our Tinker program, where people are working on peer leadership, we see this all the time, these collaborations. Hey, I'm doing this, want to do this. Sometimes they even partner on gyms. Sometimes they sell locations to one another. Sometimes they'll just give each other advice or help or connections. I love this level because it's really all about being the connector. This is the level that you need to be at if you want to open multiple locations. You know, let's face it, I know a lot of people who they'll see a gym down the street failing and they'll swoop in and they'll buy it out when they don't even have like self-leadership skills. And the reason that they're buying this out is temptation. They don't have the discipline to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, is this actually worth it yet? Um, they don't have the team leadership skills. They're still doing lots of work in their own business. You know, this was me. I had no team leadership skills. And when we opened our second location, it just meant I was doing double the work for the same amount of money. Now I've got a 70-hour a week job running back and forth between these two gyms because I didn't have any team leadership skills. And I opened the second gym because I didn't have all of the self-leadership skills that I needed to actually think it through, read a PL. How is this actually going to help me? So the thing about the peer leadership level is you have to be able to mentor and influence other people. You're gonna have to coach them. Quite often you'll have peers who are also successful, and they'll be like, you know, we should do something or somebody should go, you know, do this thing. And it's really up to you to go first to say, hey, let's pull these people into the same room, let's have a conversation and now let's take action on it. I mean, it's very common for people at this level to have meaningful discussions that are never acted upon, but real peer leadership means getting people to collaborate and actually taking steps to work on it. It also means that if you have multiple locations, you have to become a mentor to the people managing those locations. It's not enough just to have a playbook that you duplicate over and over and over again. If you've got a manager running your gym, you have to mentor them. And that requires a completely different skill set. You have to learn how to negotiate, you have to learn how to collaborate, you have to have a partnership mindset to expand safely and scale your business. And the fourth level, after founder, farmer, and tinker is chief. And this is where you lead a tribe. Now, if what I'm about to say winds up sounding scary to you, don't worry. Most entrepreneurs never have to make it to this level. In fact, most entrepreneurs get to that farmer phase, they make a couple hires and they stay there forever and they fall into the traps of like, it's easier for me to just do it myself. Oh, I wish I could do this without staff. They never build the team leadership skills and so they never evolve their business. That team leadership becomes their ceiling. And so, oh, there's not enough money to keep hiring these staff. Oh, this generation doesn't want to work. They make these excuses for their failure to evolve as a leader. That said, most of us will never get to the chief level of leadership, and that's okay. If you get to the tinker level of leadership, you can still make enough to retire. You can still have a very successful business with a great income as a gym owner. You can still buy your building, you can make other like we have almost 80 tinkers who have become millionaires now. That's great. Chief is something different. Chief is about uh building a bigger tribe and inspiring the larger community, not just your team. It's about creating a story and a culture and a vision that other people rally around. So in the founder and farmer phase is people are coming because they're attracted to you. They want to work with, you know, Coop the trainer. Um, maybe they want to work for you. And that's why, you know, in the farmer phase, that's what attracts the team to you. And in the tinker phase, they want to work with you. They want to do what you're doing, they want to do something together because your peers, your buddies, right? Like they they like you, you like them, and you just want to collaborate. But in the tribal phase, you have to be able to influence people who never meet you, who have never met you, who are inspired by the mission or the story, not by you, the leader yourself. And so that means your ability to tell a story, to paint a clear picture of the mission, um, to which is your vision, by the way, to say, here's the steps and to create a culture of like, here is how we behave who are on this mission together, not just to look for other people who are on the same mission, like you would do in the Tinker phase, but to have a mission that spreads itself and a story that spreads itself. And so your primary job as a chief is to create other leaders, missionaries, evangelists who can carry the mission forward without you, who can repeat the mission without you looking over their shoulder, who can recite exactly what they're doing without holding up a cue card and memorizing your mission statement or your vivid vision or whatever, who know and live your values and can say them and can explain why. This is really what it means to build a tribe. This is what it means to build a chief. The skill that you need here is the skill of building other leaders. And I'll tell you, that is not for the faint of heart. Working with powerful people can be pretty scary. It can mean that you have to give up a lot of your management, you have to turn them loose to do the best thing in the best interest of the community. But if you're a CrossFit Jib, you know what I'm talking about here. If um, you know, you're part of another movement, you know what I'm talking about here, right? If you're a part of kettlebell culture, if you're if you're a rogue gym, you probably know what I'm talking about here. If you do jujitsu, you know what I'm talking about here, because that is a tribe. It's not just a business. There are, you know, thousands and thousands of BJJ gyms out there, and a lot of them are part of the same tribe, and a lot of them are part of competing tribes, but they all do BJJ together. And that's really it's the story, right? A lot of people who do uh Brazilian jujitsu, for example, can tell you all kinds of stories about its founder. That's great. And what is the purpose and what makes you different? Like this is all part of tribe leadership. The only way to expand beyond your immediate and personal reach is to multiply leadership through others. And that means you have to have the skills of self-leadership, you have to be able to focus, you have to have resilience. You also have to have the skills of team leadership, you have to give clarity to people, you have to delegate and trust other people, and you have to tell them how they're doing with honest feedback. It means uh partner partnership mindset. It means, you know, at uh pure leadership level, it means you have to be able to work with others, get people aligned and moving in your direction. They might do it differently, but you're both going towards the same mission. The only way to expand out your immediate reach is to multiply your leadership through others. And that means that they are not attracted to you. They're not, you know, attached to you, they're not connected to you, they're attracted to the story, they're connected to the mission. They are working in this community, in this tribe, because they believe in the mission that you might just be the head of. Now, let's talk about how to fail at each level. In the founder phase, this is very common. Founders who lack focus make constant program changes. They jump from one marketing scheme to another. They post on Instagram every day for 30 days and then they never do it again. They have high client churn, they can't keep staff around. Uh high staff churn too. And so they just stay in the founder phase where they're hustling and grinding until they burn out. They never really make any money. After three or five years when their lease is up, they get out of the game and pretend to be inspired by selling real estate. In the farmer phase, what holds people here is their inability to lead staff. And I don't just mean hire staff, I don't just mean pay staff or incentivized staff. I mean they're micromanaging their staff. They burn out, they say, like, I wish I could do this by myself, or what is it with these Gen Zers? Or, you know, they abdicate like I did. I mean, my biggest issue after I solved the delegation problem was abdication. I didn't want to be working in the gym every single day. I wanted to be working for the CrossFit Journal and Two Brain. And so I was just like, okay, here's the playbook. Go, right? I abdicated. I just left and I went through two managers that way. Guess what? They burned out quickly, and I fell right back into managing the gym again until I finally figured it out. That's what keeps you in the farmer phase, is your inability to lead a team. Then you've got in the tinker phase, the reason that people can't expand through partnerships and collaboration is you've got people who can't work with peers. Maybe they've just been a solopreneur for too long and they just don't know how to partner. Maybe, you know, they they've got some suspicion or guilt or, you know, like uh zero sum gay mentality that stops them from actually collaborating with others. These are things that we're usually raised with that we get from our parents or our schooling, and they just can't get over it, right? Of course, yeah, they've they've got like um something that stops them. They're shy, right? Or, you know, whatever syndrome of the month is popular right now. The reality is you need to be able to overcome that if you're actually going to build something that grows beyond you. So these people constantly are con, you know, fighting with the landlords, or they're like blaming their staff for not growing their gym, or they can't partner with other people because they need to have like, you know, uh, we will only refer to each other. They can't partner with chiropractors because they got to have a written agreement for referrals, like cross-referrals, and they have to have rules about it. That means they're constantly fighting, they're fighting the government, they're posting rants online, right? About whatever politics, religion, tact, whatever. That means that they they never expand their perspective, their circle never expands and it's constantly shrinking. And they think that they know everything because their single circle is so small that they know every pebble, every blade of grass in that circle, but they never look up and beyond that circle to see what's actually possible. They have a tiny little sphere of influence and they protect that jealously. And that's why they don't expand beyond Tinkerphase. And then, you know, you've got chiefs, people with great ideas, people with inventions, innovators who should be able to change our world. And they can't inspire anybody else. They can't tell a story, they can't share a compelling mission. And so their business becomes their whole life because that's their entire kingdom, that's what they can control, that's who they um can influence. Those are the people saying, You're so great. Chiefs who can't learn how to lead at that level will never change their town. They will never have other gym owners come for lunch, they will never change the fitness industry because they're so focused on what they have and so scared of losing it. A business will always rise to the level of its leadership and no further, and then it'll fall to the level of its worst staff. But busting through that glass ceiling will also attract better people to you. So, quickly, here are the action steps. If you're in founder phase, you're hustling and grinding, you're not making any money, you know, you've got a low number of clients, like 50, 60, you can't get past that. You need to adopt the golden hour. That's my book, The Golden Hour. Read that book, apply it for three months, and everything will change. If you're in the farmer phase and you've got high staff churn, you can't get past like 100, 120 clients, and you're working all the time and you just keep working harder and not making any more money, you've got staff frustrations, um, adopt the value ladder strategy. We teach this in Two Brain. It's also in my book, Jim Order's Handbook. If you're in the tinker phase and you know, just things just don't seem to be growing. Like you're making a couple little investments, but you are always getting pulled back into problems with your gym, and you just can't seem to, you know, successfully go to two gyms or you're going to two gyms and then back to one, you're always running out of money. You need to adopt a collaborative mindset. And if you're in the chief phase and you just can't inspire the people around you, then you need to focus on creating other leaders and becoming a better storyteller. Your gym's growth is capped by your leadership, not your programming or marketing. And the best way to level up your gym is to level up yourself. What I'd like you to do here is listening to this podcast, identify honestly where you are. You don't have to tell me, you can if you want. Just tell yourself like, am I in the founder phase? Am I hustling and grinding and not making any money and barely making ends meet? It doesn't matter if you've been there for 10 years or 10 months, until you master a level of leader self-leadership, you will be in the founder phase forever. Am I in the farmer phase? Am I struggling with my staff? And do I feel like it's a battle? And I've got 12 staff, I'm not sure what anybody's doing, and none of them do it as well as I do. You need to master team leadership. Be honest with yourself. If you're in the tinker phase and you're just kind of like shyly learning things, but you're not collaborating with anybody to build something bigger than you could build on your own, well, then you need to work on peer leadership. And, you know, frankly, if you're getting pulled back into your gym instead of thinking about the next gym, you probably learn how to need to need to learn how to mentor your staff. And finally, if you've reached kind of a level and you're like, oh man, I don't even know what's next here. Like, what do I do? I've got money, I've got a successful business. I don't want to just open another gym because I'm bored. Like, what do I do? And you're seeking, well, you know, then you need to start thinking about tribe leadership and actually changing things for everybody else. I've got further resources. If you're not sure where to start with this and resources, I mean, obviously working with a mentor is your best step, but you can just go to gymownersunited.com. You can find me in there. You can send me a DM and say, Coop, heard that podcast about leadership. Where do I start? We'll have a little conversation with me, not a bot, and I'll give you some resources. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And if you really want to run a good gym, you got to start by running yourself.