Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
Ask Clients These 3 Questions to Boost Revenue Today!
The fastest way to figure out what people want is by asking the right clients the right questions.
Today, Mike Warkentin sits down with gym owner Toni Roy of Breathe CrossFit to break down how the Pumpkin Plan transformed her business.
Following the steps, Toni created a list of clients who bring her the most joy and a second list with her highest-value clients. Typically, a gym owner circles the clients on both lists to ID the members they want to replicate. In Toni's case, the groups had zero overlap.
This insight pushed her to rethink her offerings and create a hybrid membership built around CrossFit, personal training and nutrition—a combo that delivers better results for clients and boosts average revenue per member.
Now, regular Goal Review Sessions allow her to continue the conversation: She can catch problems early, celebrate successes and upgrade prescriptions to serve clients better.
Toni also gives a behind-the-scenes look at the new-moms group she developed with her Two-Brain mentor. The support-centered program is already turning into a relationship-building referral funnel.
Tune in to learn how to identify your best clients, provide more value and grow your revenue.
Use the link below to buy your tickets to the 2026 Two-Brain Summit and hear from Pumpkin Plan creator Mike Michalowicz!
Get the exact questions to ask in your Seed Client interviews via the link below!
Links
Two-Brain Summit Tickets
Seed Client Interview Questions
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
1:46 - Using The Pumpkin Plan
6:14 - Ask what clients want
10:09 - Increased ARM
13:28 - Tips for doing the exercise
16:29 - Taking action with a mentor
If you know exactly what your clients really want, your business is gonna generate more revenue. So how do you know their secret desires? Well, you actually you just ask. Sounds simple, but business owners, myself included, regularly forget to do this. We guess, we assume, and we make huge costly mistakes. Today on Run Up Profitable Gym, we're gonna talk about a proven system for finding out what your clients want and then giving it to them so that you can make more revenue. With me today, Tony Roy of Breathe CrossFit in New Hampshire. She's done the pumpkin plant exercise, which was created by Mike McAllowitz, who will be speaking at the 2026 TwoBrain Summit. Get your tickets via the link in the show notes. This is sometimes called the Seed Clients Exercise Inside Two Brain. Tony, welcome. How are you today?
SPEAKER_02:I'm doing good. How are you?
SPEAKER_01:I am excellent. I'm very excited to hear about your experience with this fantastic fundamental exercise that we do for gym owners. I'm gonna lay out the very shortest version and I'm gonna let you tell us exactly how it went for you. So the short version, listeners, is this list the clients who make you the happiest. Make another list of the clients who pay you the most money, circle the names that appear on both lists. Those are your best clients. Take them out for coffee. At those coffee meetings, you're gonna ask them three questions. What led you to my gym in the first place? That tells you what to do with marketing to find more people just like them. What did you try in the past that you didn't like? That tells you what they're not into and also where people like them are hanging out right now and might be interested in jumping to you. Next, what's your greatest challenge outside my gym? This shows you how you can create more value and you know, offer them more services. If they all say, I'm training for a race, maybe you start a running group, something like that. So these again, it's a mistake to sit there and list these questions out like you're reading off a cue card. You're gonna have a conversation, but you're kind of gonna work them into the conversation. You're gonna take some notes when they're gone, and then you're gonna use this to improve your business. So, Tony, for you, when you first did the pumpkin plant exercise exercise, how did you do it? Did you follow that plan or vary it a little bit?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so we varied it a little bit. Um, we did exactly what you said that we wrote down uh the top 10 clients that they're the one that they come in the door, they smile, they make you happy. Those are the people that you want to kind of replicate in your gym. And then we also did the top 10 clients who essentially pay us the most money. So things like personal training. And the first and then you find the overlap. The first couple of times that we did this, either there wasn't essentially overlap in you can we also were we bought the business, um, so kind of shifting cultures, just different, nothing wrong. Um, just kind of finding what we like. We ended up kind of not having any overlap, so kind of just making adjustments. Interesting, yeah, doing it again and again, and kind of it takes a long time to kind of figure things out. So I guess what we kind of came up with is since the clients who pay us the most tend to be personal training, and the ones who bring us the most joy tend to be group classes, presumably because that's who we see the most. Where breathe CrossFit, so we're obviously passionate about CrossFit. We ended up coming up with kind of a hybrid plan where we it's not just you do personal training or you do CrossFit. We came up with a blend for the two, which honest and truly I think is the best program, and I I'm biased, but the best program that we have because it's the best of both worlds. So, for example, if someone wants to work on muscle ups and it's not coming up in class as much as they'd like, but that's still something that they really want to do, but they don't want to completely get rid of the group classes. They could meet with a personal trainer once a week or even once a month if they don't necessarily need the accountability, we'll give them homework to do for things on their own as well.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Okay, so am I getting this right? That this pumpkin plant exercise showed you that you didn't necessarily have the exact client lists that we expect, and you started a hybrid service as a result of that?
SPEAKER_03:Correct.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Wow. So that's cool because hybrid services are huge ARM boosters. So by doing the exercise and finding an interesting wrinkle, like, and that makes perfect sense. Like I hadn't thought of this before, but it makes perfect sense. Your PT clients are going to be very high value clients because obviously it's a higher value service, but some of your group clients just might by accident be the shining stars of the gym who thrive in that, you know, uh group setting and just come in with batteries included in the whole deal. And you might not have that overlap, but you saw that and then created a whole new service and a revenue stream that A gets them the results they want by giving them more, and B makes you more money.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly. We made the mistake in the beginning where you want to kind of do everything that you're seeing, like you want to start all these different programs, like you hear HyRox, you hear boot camp, kids class, like all these things, and we felt like we were doing a bunch of different things and not really good at anything. So we kind of cut things down and said, we do personal training, we do CrossFit, and we do nutrition. And then we ended up kind of blending all of them. And that's truly what we think is the best membership is doing all three essentially nutrition, CrossFit, and personal training.
SPEAKER_01:And that makes sense because this is not a member survey, right? We've all, you know, many of us have tried this and it goes really badly because you, you know, the business is not a democracy. Like you're trying to serve your clients to give them what they want, but you can't have 150 or 200 people making decisions for you as the CEO. You have to make those decisions. So this is not a member survey, but it is a way to identify what people want. It's so interesting because I hadn't run into someone who's had it go like you. Usually people are like, oh, these people obviously are the seed clients and they go from there. You had a completely different experience, but it allowed you to tailor the offerings in your business to reflect what you saw in the exercise. So I think that's just such a cool thing. And it really shows how this exercise can work in a number of different ways. So I would encourage you listeners to try this one and see what happens. If you don't find those names, why aren't you finding them on the same list? That's going to be a really, really interesting question. And the answer will probably help you make a much better business. So you were you were probably pretty surprised by that, I'm guessing, when you uh when you didn't find the people matching up on the list.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I would say like the big thing is like the ones who bring you the most joy are the ones that you want to replicate, and those are your seeds that you want to water, take care of, and watch them grow like the pumpkin plan. Um it's just figuring out what they like, and most of the time they know what they like, and every now and then they don't, but they know and they'll tell you if you just ask. And then that will help you to determine like how you should go with your business rather than you trying to come up with the ideas as you serve the clients that are already in front of you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and the mistake that I made was I I created one time, this was in like 2012 or something when the crossway games were really spinning up, and I decided, oh, I'll make this three-tier competitor stream for all these people who want to do these competitions. And I had like, I don't know, eight of them. They didn't really care. It like whatever I made up was not what they wanted. And if I had to ask them specifically, you know, these questions, I would have gotten much different, much more info that could have would have allowed me to create the right program. Ultimately, competitive stuff was not a good fit for my gym. I probably would have found that out too, because I bet a lot of my best clients would have said, I'm not interested in that at all. What I really want to learn is muscle ups. And then I could have done a hybrid program like you. So if I had done this exercise before I started whimsically throwing stuff against the wall, it would have had a much bit different result for me. So have you done this exercise more than once?
SPEAKER_02:Uh, I've done it a couple of times, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So, what was different between now you did you just describe the first instance or the second?
SPEAKER_02:Um, I'd say the first time, like there was no overlap. Like if we did kind of 10, 10 joy to 10 top ping, there was zero overlap. And then a couple months later we did it again, and there was of the 10, like let's say there was maybe two for overlap. So you could see that it was getting better. Yeah, but if I'm being honest, I haven't done it in a while, and I have thought about doing it again, but I really enjoy the way things, how things have been going. Like we are happy with our programs, our clients are happy, they're getting results. Um, I haven't felt the need to kind of do it again, um, but I guess it doesn't hurt to do it.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's you know, it's one of those things that you'd probably want to do, like if it's gonna, if you had if you only had you had the opportunity to do it one time, you would probably put it at the early stages of your gym where you need to figure out what are your core offerings and like your business model is gonna evolve somewhat, but not a ton, right? Like you're not gonna go from completely every three months gonna toss out group training or install personal training, those are kind of big decisions that last for like five or 10 years or maybe forever. So I'd suggest that like it's really valuable early on, and you could certainly revisit it. But the other thing is like if you're doing goal review sessions with people and listeners, we recommend you meet with your clients every three to six months to do goal review sessions, you're essentially doing C client interviews in those sessions as well. And you're again, you're not ripping your business apart every five years, you know, unless you really have to, because there's a major problem. But if you're like Tony and things are going pretty well, you've got these new programs you clearly know, like she listed her core offerings immediately off the top of her head as we walked in here. You don't need to change those if they're working. And if, you know, in your goal review sessions, seven clients said, Oh, you know, I'm really interested in this local mud run. You're like, okay, I can just put in a mud run training group. We're gonna do a six-week program for 250 bucks. We'll meet twice a week with some homework on the side and nutrition plan. Boom, sold out. You got seven people right there, plus three of their friends, or something like that. Like, that's how the system works as your gym evolves and you start doing these goal review sessions. So you said the results that it produced. We'll just go over this again so people understand. You did the exercise, created a brand new service offering, which is a high-value service offering. Everyone that we know has group training plus some personal training. Their ARM goes from say 150, 200 to like 275, something like that, usually because you're tacking on a 60, 50, 70, 80, 90 PT package onto a group membership. Did you see your ARM numbers boost after this right away?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, actually, I was having a talk with our mentor um, because a lot of people tend to slack off during the holidays or cancel their memberships or want to put it on hold or whatever. And I was talking with her and I was like, should we be worried? And she said, No, Tony, like your gym is growing, so you're gonna have more clients cancel their memberships, but it's not gonna your percentage, your churn isn't gonna be as high. And our revenue, even if we're losing clients, our revenue actually is staying the same, which is great, which means our arm is going up.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so that's fantastic. So this exercise clearly improves average revenue per member in your case. And for other people, it may improve specialty revenue, perception program revenue, nutrition services, any other things. Like there's kids' programs, and that's like I'll give an example of a question. Let's say someone you asked that question, what's your greatest challenge outside of my gym? And they're like, God, I'd come more often and I would I would upgrade my membership to unlimited if I could just find child care at five o'clock. And you're like, huh, seven people said that. What if we had a kids' program that runs concurrently in the second half of the gym with an adult program? And I've heard of this happening at gyms, and literally it's like all of a sudden you get a kids' membership, you get an upgraded adult membership, more revenue, happier clients' problems solved. So that's an example of how this goes. Let me ask you this when you got this info from these clients, did you start to adjust marketing in any way, or was that just a natural extension of getting a new program in place?
SPEAKER_02:So I guess so. You mentioned the Steve client or the goal reviews. Um, that's one of my favorite things that I get to do with members is even if like you find out what's going well and you find out what they're struggling with. And if things are going well, great. Like you just met with them for an opportunity to increase their motivation and for client retention. But then if things aren't going well, you know about it, which sometimes they won't share with you unless you asked, and then it gives you an opportunity to fix it. Um, I actually had a seed client interview this morning, and I have no problem like that. It's not a necessarily a sales opportunity, it's a chance to make sure your members are happy and that they're getting results, especially in group classes, because they don't have that one-on-one connection that they would with personal training. And in this goal review this morning, this client ended up switching to one of our programs where he's actually going to be a little bit more independent because he's a pilot and he has seven days of work and then seven days off. So that's something that maybe we would have missed if we didn't do the um goal reviews. So I think the the pumpkin plan and goal reviews and things like that is really important. So you can, like Tubrain says, and like the shirt behind you says, help best.
SPEAKER_01:This is exactly it's exactly the principle. And you don't know how to help best, you can offer help, but you're kind of doing the shotgun blast into nowhere unless you ask, how can I help you best? And then you can provide that. And that's exactly the way that you're gonna build a really strong gym business. And again, I've made so many mistakes with guessing on things and guessing on prices and guessing on programs and guessing on membership tiers and options and all this stuff. There's science and data, and it if you use it, your business is gonna grow a whole lot faster. Let me ask you this. So, someone out there has never done this exercise. Let's give them some tips on how to do it. I'll give tip one is gonna be do it. Actually, commit to doing this exercise. The lists will take you maybe three minutes. You don't have to be like, you know, seven, you know, 549.99, you know, you don't have to do the exact, you can just look quickly scan. I know this guy buys 17, 17 PT packages a month and do the list quickly. It could take less than five minutes. Do the exercise, do it. Tony, what do you think? Is it were these conversations were they like kind of awkward, or how did you feel about them, or how can people get make them natural and just very organic to get the info they need?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'd say when we first were thinking about doing the pumpkin plan before we even did it, that's probably why we were hesitant to do it, because I was like, uh, I don't feel comfortable going out for coffee with someone. Like, I've never hung out with them outside the gym before. They're gonna do squats. Yeah. So I think just like you're saying, do it is is what you gotta do. And then you'll refine things later. Like, and I feel like that's everything in business. Like with social media, sometimes people are afraid to make a post, but it's like you just have to do it, and then you're gonna get better by getting your reps in.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I agree with you. And I think that the other second thing that I would do is like, I wouldn't get so focused on these questions that you're sitting there just like looking for that awkward moment to ram one in where it's like she's taking a sip of coffee, you're like, What's your favorite thing about my gym? You know, like you don't have to do it that way. You can just have a conversation, just naturally sit down with people, but know in your mind that what you're looking for is you just kind of want to find out some info about like what led you to my gym, you know. And you can just say, Ah, you know, you've been here for five years. I was you're just such a great member. I'm just curious, like, what brought you here in the very first place? And they get to tell a story about themselves, like just make it natural. You can kind of get the stuff in here, but you don't have to be like, uh, and then number three, oh, what is your greatest challenge outside my gym? You don't have to do it like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, just like the first the first time we did it, I had like I typed out questions that I was gonna ask them, and like and I told them, I'm like, look, I like this is how it's supposed to be done. I'm doing it this way, and that's okay too. Yeah, and and and it works for that, but then the more you do it, the more comfortable you get speaking with people in general, and then you figure out like where to guide the um instruction. Like we created an SOP, like if I'm unavailable, or when I was out on maternity leave for our coaches to do it, and just you get like with anything, you get better just doing it over and over again, and then you don't have to follow that structure, it becomes more natural.
SPEAKER_01:And so I'll give you that one. That's a tip. We'll just listeners practice if you're feeling a little bit nervous about this, practice with your spouse, your partner, your dog, your kid, whatever, and just practice having a conversation like that. And just if you do that a few times, even in the mirror, you'll start to feel much more natural when you do this in person. I'll give you a tip, Tony. You tell me if you think this is the right one. I made this mistake. I went out with a client and we had coffee, and I did I got some info. I didn't do anything after that. My advice here, my tip would be to take action on what you see with the help of a mentor. So if you sit down and you hear some interesting stuff, hey mentor, I just went out for five coffee with five clients. This is what they told me. You can even just feed the stuff into chat GPT, you have to spit out a bullet pointed summary. Here is what I learned. What do we do? What do we do now? No, what do you think of that one?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think that's great. I think a lot of times I'll have maybe like an idea, but I don't really know what go with it. I choose to meet with my mentor weekly.
SPEAKER_03:Do you?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. I I we we used to meet monthly, and then same thing with clients. Sometimes you don't want to wait that long. And I like the additional accountability. Even if I have learned and know what to do, it's still great to bounce ideas off of someone who's kind of been through it. So we meet with our mentor uh weekly, and if something comes up, I kind of jot down like this is what I want to do, and she might kind of either say, Yes, that's a great idea, or that's great, but you should also do this instead.
SPEAKER_01:I like that. I'm gonna ask, who is your mentor and what was the last big thing you accomplished as a result of those conversations?
SPEAKER_02:Joanne is our mentor. Uh awesome. She's running for mayor as well. Joanne for mayor.
SPEAKER_01:Right? Oh Joanne.
SPEAKER_02:So since I just had a baby, I have been going to the hospital, and I they have like support groups that I've been going to, and I really want to help these people as well. We've had a diapers and dumbbell program that is good, but it's it's hard to get moms who just had a baby to commit to kind of to be honest, anything like six time, right? Yeah, yeah. So I kind of had talked to her like, what can I do since the hospital has really helped me with my postpartum mental health and things like that? I do have my baby with me, actually. She heard me talking about it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, there you go. Push the stroller, I love it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly. So we kind of came up with an idea of how to get how to help mums um bring them into our gym. So actually, starting this Friday, we're gonna be doing a mom's group where mums come in first 30 minutes is just arriving because it's sometimes hard to show up to things on time being a mom. Then the next 30 minutes is gonna be either like a guest speaker, like we have a pelvic floor therapist coming in, and then the last 30 minutes is gonna be an optional workout. So that's kind of an idea that we work through together that even though I'm gonna be giving my time up an hour and a half every week, um, I still get something out of it. It's also helping me with my postpartum recovery. My baby gets to come to work with me and helps other moms, and then like hopefully when they are ready for fitness, that they already are in an environment that they feel comfortable with. And I think I would rather spend time doing that than spend money on Facebook ads and Google ads and things like that. That I would rather give my time and help someone than kind of just throw my money and hope for the best.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and like really, like you just laid out essentially like you've got a referral funnel in the making there where like moms know other moms. If you have a great program, they're gonna tell other moms, and there's always they have connections and Family members. So every new person that comes into your gym becomes a source of referrals. And, you know, we technically tell people work that referral funnel before you get to paid ads because it's cheaper and easier. It just takes your time and effort to talk to people you already know and they're going to refer the warmest leads you can ever get rather than throwing$500 a Facebook and hoping for a cold lead. You can do both, and we recommend that gym owners run four funnels at a time. But that referral funnel is just that's the one. If you're going to do one funnel, that's the one to crush. So I'm going to let you go and deal with your baby because I think you've got mom duties coming up here. But I want to thank you so much for sharing your experience with the pumpkin plant. Listeners, I'd encourage you to do this exercise because you saw here, Tony did it, increased her ARM because she discovered a great way to make her clients happy. Thanks, Tony.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01:That was Tony Roy. This is Run a Profitable Gym. Please hit subscribe on your way out the door so you don't miss a single show like this. And now here's Two Brain Founder Chris Cooper with a final message.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, it's TwoBrain Founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I'd love to have you in that group. It's Gym Owners United on Facebook or go to gym ownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
