22 Lessons From 20 Years as a Gym Owner

Twenty years of gym ownership will teach you things no course ever could.

Chris Cooper’s gym, Catalyst, recently turned 20, and today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain's founder is sharing 22 lessons he’s learned over the last two decades as a fitness entrepreneur.

Chris reveals the early mistakes that nearly cost him everything and the systems that finally gave him stability and freedom. He also explains how mentorship and self-improvement helped him acquire critical skills and avoid expensive missteps.

You’ll find out why coaching skills rarely determine long-term gym success and what actually separates gym owners who survive from those who eventually burn out.

Among Coop’s top lessons: Fix yourself before fixing the business, consistency matters more than intensity, and gym owners aren’t selling workouts—they’re selling hope.

Tune in for two decades of hard-won wisdom that could save you years of pain and tens of thousands of dollars.

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1:04 - Pre-2005 to 2009

27:15 - 2010 to 2013

44:06 - 2014 to 2017

59:13 - 2018 to 2021

1:11:45 - 2022 to 2025

Transcript

Chris 0:02

My gym catalyst turned 20 a few days ago. It's hard to believe. And over that last 20 years, I've had to learn a lot of lessons. I've gone through some really tough times and had some really great times too. And I'm today going to share with you some of my top lessons from owning a gym for the last 20 years. I call it my 20 top lessons, but I've actually got 22 for you. Usually I like this podcast to be really tactical. And I'm going to say, do this thing and this will happen. I want you to be able to leave the podcast and take action on it right away. It's not my goal to give you knowledge, it's to give you actionable steps that you can actually go out and do. But today, I want to share with you some of the mindsets that got me through, some of the perspectives that I wish I had known right from the start. And frankly, you know, some of the things that you're going to need to adopt if you really want to have a gym that lasts 20 years or 30. I mean, we're not done yet. So today I'm going to give you my top 22 tips or things that I've learned from owning a gym for the last 20 years. And I'm actually going to start with something that I knew before I even opened my gym. And that is that every company is a media company now. When I was still a personal trainer working in a studio in 2003, I was publishing content on T-Nation. It was even called testosterone.net back then. I was publishing content on various personal training blogs. I was also publishing content in two local online newspapers. One was called Sue Today and one was called Sue News. And that's where all the clients were coming from. They would see me on these like local news sites and talking about fitness or talking about athletic training or performance. And they would come and find me at the personal training studio. And eventually, a couple of my clients who are very entrepreneurial noticed and they said, Chris, all these new clients coming in the door are coming to see you. You should really own your own gym because you can't take them all. You're full. And so to kind of humor them, I took a tour of some local businesses. And I was like, I can't afford any of these rents, you know, forget it. But while I was out touring one day, the owner of the studio found out. And as soon as I got back to the studio, I got fired. What happened though was that when I opened up a new studio down the street two weeks later in this second floor apartment, it wasn't even a commercial building, about 40 people followed. They immediately came knocking on my door because they were following the authority, they're following the expertise. And while they probably didn't have a high affinity for me as a coach, they did have a high affinity for my knowledge and they had a lot of trust. And that was because of media. You know, years later, when I got hired by CrossFit to work for CrossFit Media, it was Greg Glassman who put this idea into words. And he's the one who said, Chris, every company is a media company now. But I was doing that back in 2003, building authority. It's still the advice that I give to gym owners every time I meet them, and it's still the advice that fewest follow because it feels hard. But the basic rule here is give knowledge for free and sell coaching. You are not in the knowledge business. None of us are. The information age is over. If people didn't find a workout to do on Google, they're finding it through a chat bot now and you know, having their whole workouts developed for them. But that's not going to save most people. What will save most people is coaching. And so publishing knowledge for free and selling your coaching is still an amazing business plan. I actually learned this from Seth Godin and uh Chris Anderson years and years ago in his book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson specifically spells out be expensive or be free. This is a great rule for all businesses. And it's something that I have followed since before my business was even live. Publish content. That way the right people will find you, and content stays evergreen. So even if you wrote something 10 years ago, somebody can find it today and still find their way to you. That's my top lesson from 2003. In 2004, I learned a great lesson about showing up and just getting started, doing one thing. So I'm going to call this lesson paint one wall. The problem with perfectionism is that you never get anything done. You're always paralyzed. You're overanalyzing, you're procrastinating. And the difference between uh a perfectionist and somebody like me is a perfectionist says, okay, I got to paint my house. Well, I got to find a weekend when I can, you know, just like shut down on Friday and tape everything off and move the furniture and cover everything in drapes and have the right paints and go to the paint store and start the painting and finish the painting all at once. And that's why they never get it done because that perfect weekend never comes along. A guy like me, who is not a perfectionist, says, I got 10 minutes, I can paint one wall. And so they slide stuff away from the wall real quick, they get up on the ladder and they start painting. And if they spill a couple of drops, they say, I'll fix it later. And if they miss a spot, they say I can I can come back and get that later, but they just start. And this is a key that I learned both from Seth Godin, who wrote a lot about writer's block, but also from uh this book called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. What Seth said was that professionals show up and get to work. Professionals don't procrastinate, professionals don't get writer's block. Professionals write not because they're inspired or they wake up with energy or they're just this amazing artist. Professionals write because it's Monday and it's six o'clock and it's time to write. And from that knowledge, what I learned was you just sometimes have to get started. And it's better to start imperfectly than to wait for the perfect time or the perfect moment or the perfect situation. This is what led me to signing a lease on an apartment. I mean, my first gym was like 400 square feet. It had this red carpet on the floor and gray wallpaper. Not exactly a gym, you know, environment. It didn't have mirrors. I had one barbell, you know, I had$16,000 to spend on equipment from my uh co-owner's credit card. I mostly bought crap that I never used again. I had, you know, lat pulldowns, I had a cable crossover, everything was used, everything looked used, but I polished it up and I just got started. Now part of that was the removal of choice, which I'll come back to later. But one of the most important things in business is like, don't wait until you can do something perfectly, just start it. And this has played out so many times as I've launched a new program and you know, tried a new ad or written a blog post. Like you don't wait until you have the perfect idea. You don't wait until you're a great writer. You write, you publish, you get out there and you go and you come back and do it again the next day. And eventually your crappy attempts get buried by your good attempts. You know, I've been writing a business blog for gym owners since 2009. Not everybody who listens to this knows it. It's still live as a reminder to me that it's better to start imperfectly than to not start. If you go all the way back to 2009 and don't buy ads.com and you read the first blog post called Don't Be Vanilla, you'll read it and you'll say, What the hell is he even talking about? It's not a good blog post, but the stuff that we publish now is so good that nobody goes back into the old archives. The new stuff has buried the old stuff. And so paint one wall is the lesson, but it's really don't wait until things are perfect to make a change. You know, you don't want to take big guesses, you don't want to gamble with your family's finances and just like quit your job and go open a gym the next day. Of course not. You want to minimize risk wherever you can. But once you have knowledge and once uh, you know, you've minimized the risk as much as you can, it is your duty to act. Now, here we go in 2005. First, hard lesson being a good coach is not the same as being a good owner. One thing that I didn't realize as a personal trainer is that being an owner is a different job than being a coach. And it wasn't until I read the emith that I really found a way to express this. But here's what happened. I opened up my gym, it's 2005. I've got so many certifications. I had uh like an NSCA, CSCS, which I thought was the top of the of its class, and it probably was at the time. I had an ACE certification. I was an exam proctor for ISSA. I used to go like see oversee their certification weekends. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm just gonna put every personal trainer in town out of business now because I'm so certified. And my business cards, you know, had this like list of certifications that read like alphabet soup. And, you know, maybe I was the best trainer, but I wasn't the best trainer for everybody. And also being the most knowledgeable didn't make me the best trainer for most people. You know, there were guys with better personalities and and women who were just more charming and happy and upbeat who were crushing me at business. And I couldn't figure that out until I read the emyth by Michael Gerber. And he was talking about how you have to wear different hats in the business. And one of the hats is trainer, a different hat is a CEO. And the skills of the trainer don't really translate that well to the skills of the CEO. It took me a long time to get that message. In hindsight, it's like, well, duh, Chris, that seems really obvious. But I think I needed to hear it from somebody else. I think you probably need to hear it from me. And the reality here is that there's a lot of people in the fitness industry who just tell us if you're a really good trainer, the business will come to you. If you're a really good trainer, the results will show up and you'll automatically attract their friends. If you're a good trainer, everybody in town will be talking about you. That is not the case. Even if you're a good trainer, it doesn't mean you'll keep the clients that you already have, let alone uh have any kind of marketing chops at attracting them. And you definitely won't be good at managing other people. And this is the big key to business is nobody told us that when you open a business, you're gonna have to manage other people. Being a good personal trainer does not make you a good manager of other people. In fact, it probably sets you up for failure as a manager of other people because as a personal trainer, you're telling people exactly what to do and they're doing it, and that's what they're paying you for. When you start managing other people, it just doesn't work. Like you can't just be an authoritarian. You can program other people, you can program your staff, and you should tell them exactly what to do, just like you would tell your personal training client what to do. But you're paying them, they're not paying you. And so if they don't do it, you know, the risk is all on you. And so being a good coach is not the same as being a good owner. That led to a lot of other lessons, but it's something that wasn't obvious to me when I started, and that was probably my top lesson of 2005. In 2006, my top lesson was a very painful one, and that was to protect your cash flow. What was happening was I was selling uh personal training to people, and so they would call up and they'd make an appointment, and we would write them like handwrite them into our little book. And after the appointment, we'd try to book their next appointment. And at the end of the month, I would give them a bill. Here's what you owe me, you know, and then some of them would pay it on the spot. Most of them would pay it the next time they were in. So it was a week later. Some of them would take a month or two months to pay, and some of them would just disappear. And of course, I hated collecting. And so over time, between 2005 and mid-2006, we racked up$12,000 in receivables. All right, my clients owed me$12,000. And what's the terrible part was that I had to pay my coaches anyway. So they the clients were not paying me yet, but I was still paying my coaches on time. And I was at the end of my overdraft, I was at the end of like the business bank account. I was even maxing out my visas to pay my staff, and it all reached this crisis point in 2006 where I had no money coming in, nothing in the account, and I couldn't pay my staff. My cash flow was horrendous. And I've I kind of reached rock bottom desperation. I actually called the bank and I'm like, hey, can I miss a payment on my loan? The loan officer said, Chris, what's going on? I told her exactly what's going on. And she was like, Well, all you got to do is refinance your loans. Let's spread it out over five years, make smaller monthly payments. And if you do get the money in advance, you can pay it off sooner. That forced me to learn how to like ask people, but the real lesson here was protect your cash flow. Cash flow is your lifeblood. If you run out of cash flow, it doesn't matter how much other people owe you. That's just pretend money until it's in your hands. It doesn't matter how many great ideas you have or this partnership that you're working on, or the new ad that you're setting up, or like the new logo you're making, or whether you're affiliated or deaffiliated with that brand, it doesn't matter. What matters is is there enough cash coming into your business to pay your staff, pay yourself, and keep the lights on with a little bit left over as a cushion? You need to collect up front and pay on delivery. And so at that point, I said, I'm never doing this again. We started selling packages in advance. The other benefit that came from that, and there were really a couple, but the first one was that we no longer had a problem collecting for missed payments. So we had a policy that if you canceled an appointment late, like you know, that morning, um, we would charge you for it. And we were busy, we were packed. We could have filled that spot if we had known in advance that the client was going to cancel. But we were letting people get away with it because we didn't have their money. When they paid us for sessions in advance, and we made the policy clear and we reminded them once. And the second time we took away one of the sessions that they had paid for, suddenly we didn't have this problem anymore, and clients were less likely to cancel because there was a cost to it. And so the staff got paid, the business got paid, and the clients were actually more likely to show up. The other thing that happened during this time was I started attracting a lot of other trainers. I was paying my trainers on the four-ninths model even then. So they were collecting 44% of the revenue that came in for personal training. This on the surface sounds like kind of a weak math proposition. What do you mean I'm not getting half? But the reality is that all these other trainers had problems that they couldn't solve themselves. They had cash flow problems, they had clients who weren't paying them. Um, they had uh, you know, all kinds of problems with collections. They weren't marketing, they weren't getting clients. And so when I had a trainer come in that I really wanted to sign, I was a little bit nervous about explaining the model to him. And he said, I'll make more money than doing this on my own by working for you. Because every time a parent says, Can you come and talk to my kids' hockey team? I go there. And then either I'm too embarrassed to give them the bill, or I give them a bill and I never collect, or I give them the bill and they forget to pay me the tax or whatever. He's like working for you, those problems are all solved for me. I will take home more money this way than trying to figure it all out on my own. And so protecting your cash flow is a valuable lesson for me in the short term because it kept my business going. But in the long term, what it actually did was create solidity for me and my family and for my staff too. And they recognized that. The top lesson from 2007 was just ask. So in 2007, you know, we had done some pivoting, but honestly, every time there was a problem, I was dreaming up the solution. And sometimes the solution was obvious like, don't let people run up a bill and not collect, right? It was like sell, collect in advance and pay on delivery. But still, it it made me ask like, isn't there a better way? Like, who else has figured this out? And so I started looking on chat groups. This was, you know, pretty much pre-Facebook. Um, I started doing searches through Yahoo, you know, and it's like, is anybody else struggling to collect money from their clients? And as it turns out, there were two software platforms out there at the time that did just that. One was called Champions Way and one was called Mind Body. And we signed up with Mindbody. Clients could now bill and pay and book online. They would automatically get email reminders about their appointments from us. Problem solved. And the the reason that that problem was solved was because I just asked. Now, this sounds obvious to you. If you've started a gym in the last decade, you've probably set up your software before you set up your squat rack. But back then, 2006, very few people were using software. In fact, they would have to mail you a DVD or like a CD ROM to install on your computer to set it up. It worked through the internet, but like the actual files were too big to download. This was a novel idea. And instead of saying, like, how do I fix this? I started learning to ask, how has anybody else fixed this? Now, some problems I found answers to. Hey, what does everybody else charge for personal training? I would get an answer. Some I didn't. And you know, how are people retiring from the fitness business? How are people staying in the fitness business for 20 years? How are people like actually making money at this? And you know, you'd you'd find some falsehood and stuff, just like you do now. And you'd find that, like, actually nobody's doing that well. So I still had to invent the answer to a lot of things, but there were a lot of easy questions that I didn't have to invent the answer to. Uh, I'll give you another great example. So I used to make up my own t-shirts and I would make up these obscure things with weird graphics. People would buy them out of politeness, and then I would get stuck with stock. And what I learned to do over time was just ask other people, like, what t-shirts have sold the best for you? The ones with just my logo. Okay, so that was our next stock, and we started selling out. Then I would start asking, like, what protein supplements or you know, what supplements do you carry? And I would stock those instead of just trying a sample from 30 different companies. The loan problem that I had that I solved with the bank that taught me just ask, like, don't be embarrassed. And that that just ask lesson has lent itself to my business over and over and over. I learned it when I was trying to figure out booking and billing online. We were using this paper book with scribbles and stuff and trying to count how many sessions a client had. It was ridiculous. But that has paid off so many times in trying to figure out what my niche is, you know, just ask your client and trying to figure out how to get more referrals from my client, like just ask and trying to figure out what my clients wanted instead of guessing. I've learned now just ask. I've also learned in this time that I'm not good at guessing, I'm not good at predicting what other people want. And so I am best to just ask. The reason most people don't do that is they let their ego get in the way and they tell themselves, this is my business. I'm going to invent it from scratch. It's going to be my way. I'm going to design the t-shirts. I'm going to do everything. The reality is that's the fastest path to a broken business because you just can't actually guess what people want. You have to ask them. I do that with my staff now, too. Like, hey, what do you want from this job now? And I do that every three to six months because people change and what they want changes. And if you don't ask, you'll never be able to guess. The next lesson came from 2008. Now, for those who know me, they know that 2008 was the start of what should have probably been the end of Catalyst. Uh, we were still struggling with all kinds of problems. Even though I had temporarily solved our cash flow problem, I had created a much bigger one by opening a second location. It was a CrossFit gym, and I had so I had my personal training studio downtown, and I had this CrossFit gym out in the industrial park, and I'd be going back and forth between them, paying two rents, basically doing like two full-time jobs as a CEO. I thought that CrossFit would be really, really easy to sell. And it was for maybe two weeks, you know, back in 2008. It wasn't the rest of the time I had to educate my audience on it. Nobody seemed to know how to fix the problem. There were all kinds of reasons for me to quit. And I still had three years left on one lease. I had five years left on this other lease, but I couldn't quit. And it wasn't because I'm stubborn, and it wasn't because I'm just so hardworking or so smart. None of those are true. Maybe the hardworking part. The reason that I couldn't quit was because I didn't have a choice. You know, Charles de Gaulle was a famous French general who left France in this tiny little biplane with his family in the middle of the night rather than work and serve under like a Nazi occupied France. And he he fought the Nazis for years from the UK. And when people said, like, why do you go on fighting? Why didn't you just take the good job? He just said, I'm too poor to do anything else. I'm too poor to bow, was literally what he said. I didn't know that quote at the time, but I had this lyric from a heavy metal song that said, This is all I know, this is all I have, and I will die in this gym if I have to. It's from a song called The End of the Rainbow. And I actually forget the band now, but I had that printed out and stuck on the dashboard of my truck. This is all I know, this is all I have, and I will die in this gym if I have to. And the reason was that I didn't have a choice. If I went out and looked for another job, I had no other credentials. I had a degree and basically personal training from my university. That's all there was. Um, I had no management skills, even though I had worked at management jobs it'd been years. I had no sales skills, even though I'd been selling treadmills before I went full-time into personal training. I was looking in newspapers and all the jobs were like call centers for 12 bucks an hour. And, you know, those started to look pretty good, but I knew that I couldn't pay my family's bills on that. I had no choice but forward. Now that sounds inspirational, but I'll tell you, there were days when I would have taken any other opportunity, you know, wide open that was presented to me. And I'm I'm glad that I worked through it before another opportunity presented itself because I probably would have quit. There is there is power in desperation. You know, one of the first blog posts that I wrote when I was talking about fixing my gym in 2009 was, you know, when you're when you're at the bottom, do a squat and then jump. And there's something magical to be said about hitting rock bottom because you you just can't go any deeper. Like things can't get worse. And that's freeing in a sense. You kind of get over your ego. You know, up till that point, I thought, like, if I just work hard enough, if I just think hard enough, I'm gonna get my way out of this, I'm gonna be really successful and I'll be really proud. And I figure it out by myself. When you hit rock bottom, and I mean you can't pay the rent, you can't pay the staff, you can't pay yourself for the second week in a row, and you're gonna have to borrow a thousand bucks from your parents to buy groceries. At that point, you get over your ego real quick and you say, What am I doing wrong? And I had to have that moment. Like, I have a big ego. It took me years to get to that point. I thought, like, Chris, you're smart enough to figure this out. And I finally realized I wasn't going to. And that's what made me open to getting help and seeking a business mentor. When I did meet that business mentor, he used that same trick of desperation. So, you know, I spent two hours with Dennis. The check's been in my back pocket. It's kind of sweaty. I unfold it and I'm like, okay, Dennis, what do I owe you? And he says,$500. And I said, Whoa, that's a lot for me. And he's like, I know that's why it's$500. And the next guy's paying$5,000 because that's a lot for him. And so I wrote the check and I, you know, slid it across the table and I drove back to the gym and all the way back to the gym. I'm like, that check's going to bounce. I can't do this. So I called him right away, caught him still at the library where we had met and said, Dennis, man, that that check's going to bounce. Can you hold on to it for a week or something? And he's like, No, I'm going to cash this on Friday. You probably have till Monday till it clears. But I know that if you do what I told you to do, this check will not bounce. And so for the rest of the week, I had about three days. And, you know, Wednesday I procrastinated. Thursday, I was like, oh, sweating about it, losing sleep. And Friday, I was like, I got to do it. So I went up to a client and I'm like, do you want to buy, you know, 20 sessions in advance? Sure. And boom, there I had the money. And this forcing function of having no other choice, you know, having no choice but like be embarrassed or be broke or fail, that was a real lesson for me. And, you know, while I'm glad that I do have choices now, sudden times there actually is power in desperation. You know, this was happening in 2008. Another client who was a financial services broker named Jennifer, she said to me, Hey, the market's crashing, buddy. As soon as people realize that they're losing their life savings, you're going to be the first to go. You're done. Like nobody's going to hire personal trainers anymore. And I said, Jen, I don't have a choice. And so I just kept going. Like I went out the next day and I did another show. And, you know, we just kept going because I didn't have the choice to quit. And that's powerful. Uh, 2009, my top lesson is that books tell you what to do, but coaching gets it done. So I mentioned meeting my mentor, and um, you know, I I backdated that a little bit. So I didn't meet my mentor, Dennis, until 2009, but I wanted to share that story about the bouncing check. What this taught me was that knowledge is not power. Knowledge is not the same as the answer. Knowledge doesn't get things done. So, way back in 2006, a friend of mine had said, Chris, you got to get audible.com on your phone. And I got it, and somebody paid for it for me for Christmas. And it was like$12.95 a month back then. And I was listening to business books for an hour every single day. Now I was working six or seven days every single week. And so I had this half-hour drive to the gym and half-hour drive back. And I would listen to an audiobook every single drive, not the radio, not music, an audiobook. And I went through 50 audiobooks between 2006 and 2009, easily 50. I can show you them on my phone. And my business didn't change. Not one iota. Yes, it was great to hear from Seth. I love the ideas. Yes, it was great to hear from marketing and the power of nice and all these other books, but none of them changed my business. When I met with my mentor the first time, he listened to me for about an hour and a half and then said, do this by Monday. And of course, you know, he held that check over my head. So I had to actually do the work. What did he tell me? It wasn't a novel idea. It was basically what I had learned from the emyth that I mentioned earlier from Michael Gerber. It was like, sit down and write out the roles and tasks in your gym by Monday. Coaching forced me to do it. It has this forcing function because you don't have a choice. Once you start paying a mentor or paying your coach, you have to do the work. It's your money on the line. You can't turn around and blame the mentor if it doesn't work because they are telling you exactly what to do. It's on you to do the work or not. You're still accountable. The investment is not paying somebody else to do the work, it's paying somebody else to give you clarity and a forcing function to get the work done. Books tell you what to do, coaching gets it done. What's funny is that I never drew this parallel to my own business. My clients are paying me for the exact same thing. Even back in 2001, when they were reading my stuff online, they could have followed what I told them and just gone and done it themselves. And they didn't. I was making a living as a personal trainer back in 2002, um, because people were paying for coaching. And in my gym, it's the same thing. I publish a free blog every day. CrossFit.com used to post their workout for free every single day. You give your knowledge away and you sell your coaching because knowledge tells you what to do, but coaching gets it done. That was a key lesson in 2009. And out of all the things that I learned from that mentor, Dennis, and the process of turning my gym around, the number one takeaway that I want to share with you is coaching gets it done. 2010, my top lesson is get it out of your head. So I mentioned that uh, you know, Dennis talked about the emyth. And the reason that he wanted me to write down all the roles and tasks in my business and all the hats that I wore and how to do the job was because up until then, these checklists, or at least a picture of what is done, you know, how is it done well or what is perfectly done, they were in existence, but they were only in my head. And I thought they were just common knowledge, like, hey, I know what a clean bathroom looks like. Everybody should know that, right? That's common sense, but there's no such thing. And so if you're carrying your whole business around up here, all of your pricing, all of your policies, all your rules, what you're gonna find is that you think everybody else knows the rules. And so you think they're breaking the rules all the time, but really they just don't know what the rules are. You have to get your business out of your head and onto paper. This became really, really obvious to me when we had our second child. So we were about three years into the business. I hadn't started working with Dennis yet. Um, you know, my wife gave birth and I went, you know, I was there and then I went back to work and I coached that afternoon and that evening, you know, with my new son. And even at the time, I was like, this isn't right. This sucks. I know some of you have been in similar situations, you know, and nobody's ever held it against me, you know. Um, it was never even mentioned again. It's just what I had to do to feed that that kid and my wife and my daughter. But the reality is that should never ever happen. And the reason that it happened was because if I didn't go train those clients, I thought nobody else could. I should have just written down my processes, written down my policies, and shared them with my staff. And they could have easily delivered those clients. And I would have made, you know, some money anyway. But most importantly, I would have been there with my little baby and my wife and my daughter. So get it out of your head is really, really, really important. And it again, it's like I would, I had read the emyth before that. And until Dennis forced me to sit at a coffee table in my living room and write down all the rules and tasks of my business, it just didn't happen. What I also learned from that process is that I forget stuff. There's so much to learn and so much to do that if I don't want to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over, I have to write it down. And so I started a blog, which was a love letter to myself called don't buy ads.com. You can still go see this blog. And I started writing love letters to future Chris. Don't do this, do this. Here's how you do it. Here's the form you need, here's the instructions to do this in case you make this mistake again or in case you quit. Now, of course, this is like what made the lesson stick and made me understand the lessons and be able to explain them to other gym owners so well. And on the don't buy ads.com, which turned into a blog, a lot of people started reading that and taking the instructions and saying, okay, I can do this for myself back in those days, anyway. The lesson is like get it out of your head. The way that you retain any knowledge, any learning is by reflection, by writing it down. You know, back around that time, I was reading this book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. And um, Gladwell was talking about the 10,000 hour rule that if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you'll be good at it. That's only sort of true. The truth is that 10,000 hours of good practice makes you an expert at just about anything. But you can't just walk up to piano, smash the keys, 10,000 hours, and become a concert pianist. You have to have feedback, you have to have coaching, you have to have this feedback loop. And that means you have to get it out of your head. So just like a basketball player, like practicing a shot for 10,000 hours will get make him better at free throws because you've got immediate feedback. The ball goes in or it doesn't. But just trying something for 10,000 hours in your business doesn't give you that feedback unless you sit down and reflect on it and type it all out or write it out or record here's what happened into your phone. And this is a massive lesson that I think a lot of entrepreneurs miss. They learn stuff, they take in books and podcasts and videos like this one, and they don't try it, or they don't reflect on it afterward to find out like how it worked for them. You know, a great example of this in our business was sell by chat. So somebody talked to me about like, how do you do how you use sell by chat? And we said, I don't know, we're skeptical, but we'll try it. And the first time we tried it, it it really didn't work very well at all. And so we wrote down like, here's what we did. And then we started mapping out a flow chart, like, well, here's how we would talk to a real person over text and started trying that. And oh, it started to work. And then we said, okay, well, here's what we would do if we were talking to a real person in the coffee shop, and then that worked even better. And now, of course, you've got CRMs that try to do this for you, or they automate the process at least. GLM is the best. And, you know, there's there's a lot to it. But in the early days, if you had just read a book about sell by chat, you wouldn't have profited from it. If you had just read a book and tried it, and it didn't work, you wouldn't have profited from it. You have to iterate and you have to reflect on how it works. You know, Facebook ads are no different. I know hundreds of gym owners who say, I tried Facebook ads once, they don't work. Well, they work real well for the people who stick with them and iterate and write down what's going right and what's going wrong. So, my top lesson from 2010 is get it out of your head. Anything that you learn, anything that happens, good or bad, write it down. Keep a daily journal of everything that goes on in your gym. That journal will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you and more valuable every single day that you use it. My top lesson from 2011 came from this book called Drive by Dan Pink. And he said in the book, most people don't have a single happy thought all day. This was the start of a big lesson that nothing changes in your business until you do. So even by 2011, I was working a lot. My gym was fixed, you know, for the most part, it was profitable, but I was still working a ton. And it was taking me many, many years to fix the mistakes that I had made at startup. When we mentored gym owners, it doesn't take them four years like it took me, but they also don't have to figure it out from scratch. They they have the knowledge and they have a coach or a mentor working with them to help them make the change. The change is the hard part, the knowledge is not. But what I learned in that period is like if you're burned out, if you're depressed, if you're angry, if you're exhausted, that affects your business. You have to fix the owner before you can fix the business. Now, in my case, I had to fix the business first, but we quickly reached this ceiling where we wouldn't grow anymore. And it was because I didn't fix myself. I was cranky. I was stern when I didn't have to be stern. Uh, I was mean to people, you know, I was sarcastic. I was making fun of people uh like behind their backs, stuff that I would never do now. But what the pivot point for me was Dan Pink's book when he said most people don't have a single happy thought all day. What I started doing was just watching my thoughts, right? Like the core principle of meditation, you watch your thoughts and you stop judging yourself for them, but you try not to have as many negative thoughts. And as I counted one day, you know, how many times am I having a negative thought and how many times am I having a positive thought? You know, I'd it would be 200 to zero, 110 to zero. And so I started this process of let's stop the negative thinking and let's start thinking positively. And when I did that, I fixed the owner, which eventually fixed the business, and my business started to grow. I became somebody that people wanted to be around again. Around that time, one of our clients went to visit another gym. They were in another CrossFit gym. And you know, this poor guy was the owner of this gym was so burned out. So my client showed up at six. The gym was supposed to be open and their first class was at six. He's the only one in the parking lot. 6.05, some other cars pull in, you know, 612 or so. The owner rolls in, put up coffee, unlocks the door, walks in, doesn't hold any but the door open for anybody, flicks on the lights, everybody just kind of trickles in behind them. Nobody says anything. They go start their warm-up. You know, he's writing the warm-up on the board, they're doing it. He disappears, probably to use the bathroom or something. He comes back and he starts the workout. And the client comes back to my gym later and he's like, Wow, I can't believe it. Like, you know, your coaches greet us at the door and the lights are on and the music is on, and the they lead every step of the warm-up and all this stuff. And it wasn't that that owner was making a mistake, it's that that owner was burned out, he was exhausted. And I don't think his business could have been saved until he either replaced himself in that warning group or fixed himself. Of course, fixing the business and fixing the owner go hand in hand. If you had told me this when I was at my worst point in 2008, I would have said, screw you. I need money, and I had to fix my business a little bit and then fix the owner, and then fix my business even more and then fix the owner. But what a lot of us miss is that we are the ceiling. And in bad times, our business sinks to the level of our systems, and in good times, our business rises to the level of our leadership. And if our leadership ain't that good, our business doesn't rise very far. This started me down a long study of the brain. And my top lesson from 2012 was you can change your brain. In 2012, I started learning about neuroplasticity. Uh, Dr. John Rady at Harvard published a book called Spark. And that book triggered in me a desire to learn more about the brain. And so I started, started studying neuroplasticity. And I learned about Lowenstein's gap theory from Seth Godin, and I learned about the practice mindset. Now, if you got to turn the podcast off, give me two minutes before you do that. Okay. This is a long show because I have a lot to share. It's been 20 years. The practice mindset, if this is the only thing you get from this episode, the practice mindset is the one to keep. In the practice mindset, you view every new experience as practice for the next experience, the next rep. I got I had to learn a lot of hard lessons because I made so many mistakes at a startup and I had to change so much. And I got so many scars and bruises from it. But the reality is that I got to make those fixes when my business was still small. And so the mistakes, while they seemed like earth-shattering at the time, weren't that expensive. If I made those same mistakes now, instead of costing me hundreds of dollars, they would cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. The key is thinking like you're practicing, not thinking like you're on stage, not thinking like this is game day, like everything's on the line here. It's thinking this is practice. Next time I do this, I will do it better. Now, reflection, of course, falls into this too, right? Because if if you don't have like reflection time, the practice doesn't matter. You're just throwing the basketball and there's no net. You're not getting any feedback. But having that mindset, the practice mindset allows you to forgive yourself. It allows you to take pressure off yourself when you're making decisions. Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do this for three months, and then we're probably going to change it because we're gonna do it better or we're gonna do something different. That's what the practice mindset is all about. And what that does is it frees you up to try things, it frees you up to have a scientific perspective on things because you don't have to guess anymore. You don't have to guess right all the time, and you won't lose everything if you guess wrong. So the practice mindset is absolutely critical to entrepreneurial success. Here's how that ties into the scientific method. Science does not exist to prove you right, science exists to prove you wrong. And so the way that we make advancements in our society, in our culture, in tech is that we come up with an idea, hypo hypothesis. We're gonna test this. Okay. Well, it's probably not gonna be perfect right out of the game, out of the gate, right? Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Mike Tyson said that, the great scientist, Mike Tyson. And so we're gonna try this. We're gonna run a kids' group, okay, and we're gonna run it for ages eight to 14. Okay, cool. We're gonna take 12 kids and we're gonna charge 70 bucks because you know their parents are already paying a membership. And we're gonna discount it 10 bucks for people who are already members, too. Okay, so you run this program for six weeks, it's not perfect. Uh, but people are saying, can we come back? Okay, so you sit down and you talk to the coach who ran it and you say, What can we do better? Well, uh, that age group is too broad. You got to go like eight to twelve and twelve to sixteen. Great, we'll do it better next time. Uh, what else? Well, you can't do it at 3 p.m. because the parents can't get the kids here. Okay, great. You should charge more and not discount because you're doing a service. To the parents for after school. Perfect. Finally, maybe we need a different coach. You know, maybe it's the wrong coach. And any one of those mistakes could have discouraged us from running it again. Ah, we didn't make any money. Ah, we, you know, nobody showed up. Oh, the it's the wrong coach. I don't have the staff for this. But if you adopt a practice mindset, you learn to build and build in reps and just work on improvement instead of perfection all the time. You probably tell your clients this all the time, but adopting that practice mindset as a gym owner allows you to continually strive to get better and better and better. All right. You could change your brain. You can rewire yourself. You can nobody can make you happy. You can't make anybody else happy, but only you can make you happy. And the practice mindset is one of the ways that I've been able to do that. In 2013, the most important lesson that I took away was that the audience is the most important asset that you have. Your product can change. You might be doing CrossFit on this day, and you might be calling it, you know, body boot camp burner the next day. Your method might change, your staff might change, your location might change, but your audience is sacred. And something that Seth Godin wrote back in 2013 was that you shouldn't try to find an audience for your service. You should try to find a service for your audience. So instead of like open hanging your shingle, I'm opening a metabolic gym. Who wants to try matabolic? That'll get you a few early adopters. But if you've got this clientele of uh people that you've trained and you say, now we're going to do metabolic, they'll all say, okay, what's that? We don't care. Let's go, whatever. The key is to continually build and nurture and take care of your audience. And then when you find something that will solve their problems, just say this will solve your problems. So focus on building your audience. Now, this was a hard lesson for me to learn from the other side. I was working for CrossFit. Uh, CrossFit was into studying the brain too. For a while, there was going to be a CrossFit brain project where every fourth day on the rest day, Greg was going to post a chess puzzle. And CrossFit for Hope was largely focusing on uh, you know, chess tournaments and going to see what the top performers in in thinking and cognition and memory were doing. I mean, they were sending me to the World Memory Championships and we were going to watch these chess matches. And CrossFit Brain was going to be a thing, and I was in charge of it. And so um with Laura Bruner also, I owned CrossFitBrain.com. I had the affiliate for CrossFit Brain. We were publishing Brain Wads every single day, and we were on our way to Chicago to run our first CrossFit Brain seminar in 2013 when I got a phone call. And the phone call was Kathy Glassman, Greg's sister. And she said, Chris, we're pulling the plug. You can't do it. And I said, What are you talking about? Like I've got this website, we've got CrossFit Brain t-shirts on. Like we're in the airport, we're on our way. Like 13 people have signed up for this cert. And she's like, We can't do it. You've got an untested product, and our audience deserves better. Now she was very tactful. Kathy's a very kind person. And I was really, really mad until I was on the other side of that. And own now owning a big company with 50 really smart, really entrepreneurial mentors working for me. You know, sometimes they want to launch a side business. And I have to say, yeah, go and do it, but don't do it from my, you know, uh platform. We can't sell untested products on TubeBrain because gym owners deserve better. And so, you know, this whole like the audience is the most important asset that you have. I hope that I'm giving you value for being here, even though this is a long episode. I hope that the stuff that I give you for free in Gym Owners United is valuable because we are exchanging something here, right? We're exchanging value for value. You are paying attention, even if you're not paying me money to through TwoBrain. The audience is the most important thing that you have. Products change over time, services change over time, staff changes, location changes, even the brand can change, but the audience should remain sacrosanct. The audience is the most important asset that you have. Take care of that and protect it. In 2014, the biggest lesson that I learned was resilience. So once again, I had gone from two locations to one back to two again. And uh the second location was called Ignite Gym. We were working primarily with kids, kids who had brain trauma, concussion, also some kids with autism, which was amazing, and some kids with behavioral issues. And that got really challenging really quick. While the business grew really quickly and we were getting a ton of referrals, quite often it was for clients that nobody else knew what to do with or wanted to work with, sadly. And, you know, we were we were working really hard at this, but we also had the other gym to run. I was already, you know, doing some stuff, uh, coaching other business owners. We had a lot going. We had signed two leases, and we weren't sure how long we could keep this project going. You know, as as worthy as it was, it was really burning coaches out. And so at the same time, there were a lot of business coaches on the scene. And, you know, I was I was doing my thing, I was looking at research, I was looking at data, I was very careful about what I shared and what I recommended. And other people weren't that careful, and they were saying, do this because of that. And they had no proof, no evidence. They just thought it would be easy to sell business coaching and it was. And so they would just spout out these ideas. And so I was talking to Dave Tate at Elite FTS. And Dave, you know, years later would speak at our summit. I was interviewing him for a podcast that was called like the two-brain podcast, even. And he said, Chris, to win in business, all you got to do is survive three more years. It's a game of attrition. In three years, everybody else will be gone. To win, all you have to do is stick around the longest. Business is a game of endurance, it's a game of attrition, and it's a game of resilience. And that lesson was taught to me about the business coaching business. I mean, you know, T-Brain will turn 10 on February 13th, 2026. But I've been doing this now for a very long time. And in that time, I've seen a lot of other business coaches come and go. And this lesson of instead of engaging with them or arguing with them, just waiting them out. This has been massive for me because it's it's very distracting when somebody says bad stuff about you on social media or like attacks you. It's very tempting to go right back at them and say, You're wrong, you know, tit for tat. This lesson, all you got to do is outlast them, has really served me well. Back to the gym. What this taught me was that, you know, if I wait three years, the other competition that I have will mostly be gone. And some of that competition was in my head. You know, um, honestly, I was worried about things that I shouldn't have been worried about. But the reality is that in the next three years, several small gyms closed down. Several personal trainers gave up where they were working and came to work for me. Several clients left other gyms or fads and came to work for me. You know, one of the things that I hated competing against was this the vibration plates. And they're starting to crop up again now. But man, they were they were such a scam. The guy that was selling them in our town was this, you know, kind of slimy dude. He had set up this vibration thing and he was desperate for money. He was slamming workouts, he was slamming my gym. Any anybody that would listen, he would do it. And I said, I just got to outweight this guy. And sure enough, you know, nine months later, he was gone. There was another guy who came into town. He was selling this high-ticket offer. He rented a studio, he sold people this massive package for like$1,800 up front. And 30 days later, he had disappeared. Nobody knew where he went, he just ran off with the money. That sucks for the client, but the reality is the best thing that I can do and you can do is just survive. If you're still around in three years, you'll probably be standing alone. This is a great lesson that I'm going to come back to in 2020, and you can probably guess why. But endurance and resilience are more important than knowledge or hard work or intentions. In 2015, the lesson that I learned was to level up the conversation. So I got this phone call on my um personal home phone. 2015, I still didn't have a cell phone. I don't know how this guy got my number. There was this grandparent, and his uh grandson was on a hockey team. The hockey team had signed up for training at my gym. We were doing a lot of work with hockey teams back then. So there were probably 16 kids on this kid's team. That was the average. And this kid had fallen and like broken his wrist or sprained his wrist or something, and he couldn't come anymore and he wanted a refund. But we had made the deal with the team. And so the team had paid us, not the individual kid. But this grandparent wanted a refund from me. And I said, Well, you know, I can't give you a refund. Like our contract is with the team, the team is still showing up, we're still running the sessions. If your grandkid wants to come, he can come and we'll we'll do what we can with him. But like, I can't give you an individual refund. And the grandparent threatened to write the newspaper. And he said, I'm gonna write this letter to the editor, I'll read it to you right now. If you don't give me my money back, I'm gonna accuse you of unfair business practices and we're gonna go to like the uh uh whatever chamber of commerce, we're gonna file this complaint. And I said, Why don't we meet in person and talk about it? Now, I was terrified to meet this person. I did not want to level up the conversation, but I had been taught by mentors that the way the out of a crisis is to confront it, not to run away, not to hide, not to be passive aggressive, but to level up the conversation. And so if you get an angry email, you pick up the phone and call somebody. If somebody sends you a text you don't like, you show up at their house, or you offer to meet them, or you even you just call, right? There's a hierarchy to conversation. And when people slam you on social media, get their phone number and call them. If somebody sends you a nasty email, pick up the phone and call them. Leveling up the conversation doesn't escalate it, it diffuses it. So I offered to meet this grandpa and he came into the gym and he was just hopping mad, you know, of course. And so I asked him a couple of questions that I learned from Chris Voss. And, you know, the first question was just like, uh, you're upset because I can't give you back the money that you paid for your grandson's hockey. And he said, Yeah, you that's my money, you got to give it back. And I said, Who did you pay the money to? And he said, Well, I paid it to the hockey team, but they gave it to you. And I said, They didn't give all of it to me. You paid the hockey team for a service. Part of the service is this: like, if you want to ask the hockey team for a refund, you could do that. Do you know the coach's name? And anyway, the the longer the conversation goes, the more diffused it gets because people just run out of steam. You know, it's time is on your side in these angry conversations. But the longer you leave it, the more stress you face, the more sleep you lose, like the more it escalates in your brain. As soon as you get an argument out into the open air, it collapses. If it lives in your brain, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So there's a hierarchy of communication. And I learned this from um Chris Voss's book. Uh I can't remember what it's called. It's got the um, it's like never lose an argument again or something like that, right? Chris Voss spoke a couple of years later at the Two Brain Summit. But what I learned from him is like you always go right after the conversation. So if somebody sends me an angry email now or says something bad about me on Facebook and I have that person's cell number, I will call them the second I can. I don't wait, I don't ruminate, I don't stress about it, I don't lose sleep, I call them because I know the fastest path to resolution is just to call them. And even if we wind up not agreeing or not liking each other after the call, that usually means there's an end to it and both sides have closure. So level up the conversation. And this is also true in good time. So if a client sends you an email, ask them to get on the phone. If they uh fill out a form on your website, ask them to meet in person. Um, if they uh comment on your Facebook post, ask them to do a Zoom call with you, like continually level up the conversation. Leveling up the conversation always brings humans closer together. In 2016, my top lesson, and this is an echo of a previous lesson from a decade earlier, was to stop guessing. I fell into this trap of ego again and assuming that I knew what people wanted. And so I read this book called The Pumpkin Plan by Mike McAllowitz. And up till that point, you know, my blog had been black with silver and green on it. I was writing blog posts, my programming was very hard, trying to crazy intense. And if you'd said, Coop, like why do people come to your gym? I would have said what I liked about the gym. Well, the workouts are brutally hard, but they feel like a game. Or um, you know, it it looks like an absolute war out there, like it's it's crazy. Or I would have said something like the community, right? Like something that I couldn't have defined, but would have just said, because that's what you said. When I read the pumpkin plan, I said, I'm gonna try this. And I booked time with five of my clients. And I sat down with each one in turn, one at a time. I had my little notepad and I said, Hey, you know, what brought you to my gym in the first place? And five out of five said referral, by the way. That was interesting because I was putting money into yellow pages ads at that point. I was playing with Facebook ads, I was doing social media, and they were all coming from referrals. But the next thing that I said is like, what do you like best about my gym? And this is where I expected them to say, Oh, the workouts are hard, but the results are worth it. And oh, you know, it's so the programming is spicy and it's different every day, and it feels like a sport and it takes me back to my high school days. None of them said that. None of the reasons that I would have given were the reasons that they gave. What they said was, this is the only time all day somebody tells me I'm doing it right. This is the only time during my day when I feel like I've accomplished anything. This is the only time I ever hear a good job. Like, amazing. All of my friends are here. Okay. Like the feedback that they were giving me told me that the assumptions that I was making about what I was selling was wrong. The assumptions about my clients were wrong. They weren't just like me. I wasn't even my own best client. The assumptions that I was making about my marketing were wrong and about my sales pitch were wrong. And it's because I made these assumptions thinking that I knew what people wanted better than they did. Well, of course, that sounds ridiculous, but I wasn't asking, I was guessing. Now, when you apply this don't guess principle to your life, uh, everybody around you gets happier because you're not guessing what your kid wants for their birthday anymore. You ask them, you're not guessing what your wife wants for date night anymore. You ask her, you ask your clients what they want, and then you give it to them if you can. This is what increases ARM, this is what increases LEG, this is what increases referrals into your gym, is asking people. You don't have to know what they want in advance. Like release yourself from that pressure. Forgive yourself for not knowing, get over your ego and ask them. Telling people what you want is an act of generosity, which means that if you say to them, here's what I want from your service, here's what I'm trying to buy, you're doing them a massive favor because they don't have to guess. And in return, if you ask people, what do you want from my service? They're helping you. They're give, they're being generous with you by telling you what to sell them or what to offer them as a service. Okay. Know who to ask. Like ask your best clients, what do you want? Don't do surveys because you're going to get bad answers. You're going to get a lot of noise and very little signal. You need to know how to ask it, but you need to ask it. You need to stop guessing and actually ask people, what do you want? You know what? You know, the place where we're most guilty of this is with our staff. We think, you know, when I talk to a gym owner and I say, is there anybody on your staff who would like to make this a career? They think, no. As if they know. And the reality is that everybody changes what they want all the time. So if you're not regularly asking your staff, what do you want from this job now? You probably don't know. You're probably guessing. And most of the time, you're probably guessing wrong. My top lesson from 2017 is you can do anything, but you can't do everything right now. So in 2017, I had my gym. It was going well. I still had a second gym called Ignite. I had just started a new company called Spark. You see the trend here, Catalyst Ignite Spark. Uh, I was building um two-brain business. We were about a year in, and I was working for CrossFit all at the same time. All of those things were amazing. I loved every single one of them, and they were all moderately successful. But the problem is that I wasn't focused on any of them. I wasn't doing an amazing job at any of them, which will lead me to my top lesson from 2018 in a minute. When I realized, look, other people are carrying my weight, I didn't want that to be true. And so the first thing that I did was sold out my shares in Spark. This was the newest company. It was super profitable and super easy to run. But my partner was doing all the work. And so I called her and said, Hey, I want to sell my shares. They weren't worth very much because the company was so new, but just getting rid of one thing meant that I was now only splitting my attention four ways instead of five. That act alone made all the other businesses exponentially better because time spent in focus is not a one-for-one. You can't take a minute away from focusing on this and spend a minute here. Every time you switch your focus, there's a cost to it, and that's exhausting. So you can take a minute away here, but it's going to cost you a minute to switch and then a minute of work over here. It's three minutes, right? One plus one equals three instead of one plus one equals two. And when you're doing that with five companies, uh, one plus one equals five. It takes you five times as long to get anything done on any of them. And so eventually I sold Ignite. And then, you know, I'll talk about what happened with CrossFit here in a moment. The key though was that I read Derek Sivers' book, Anything You Want. And I was working with Dan Martell at the time. And even then, you know, I was like, Dan, there's so many opportunities in two-brain. Like I could sell, I could make my own two-brain t-shirt company, I could make my own two-brain software, I could make my own two-brain programming company. And he said, Stop it. Dan said, most people start a second thing because they don't have faith in their ability to grow their first thing. I'll say that again. Most people start their second thing because they don't have faith in their ability to grow their first thing. The reason a lot of people start a second gym is because they think they've hit the maximum potential of their first gym. That's almost never true. The reason people start a t-shirt company beside their gym is because they think they've maxed out their membership. That is almost never true. The reason people try to buy out competitors, it's the same thing. We we start new things because we're not sure how to grow the main thing. And so the lesson is that you have to keep the main thing, the main thing. Avoid all other distraction, get it off your plate and learn how to grow your main thing. When I did that, my gym reached amazing new heights, you know, numbers that we had never seen before or dreamed possible. And True Brain grew exponentially over the course of that year. We forexed in size. And the lesson is keep the main thing, the main thing, get rid of everything else. Everything else is a distraction. You're just using those distractions to hide from growth or learning what you have to actually do to level up. In 2018, this flows straight from my lesson in 2017. I got fired from CrossFit. And the lesson is that being fired from the wrong job is a win for the right job. You know, Emerson wrote that uh as part of a poem, hardly know when demi gods go, the gods arrive. And what he was saying is that, or I believe what the poem meant, was that if you've got the wrong person at the table, removing them from the table opens up a seat for the right person. But when you're the wrong person at the table, it feels like you've been thrown out of the banquet, right? You've been ejected. You feel like you've failed, they don't understand, you're angry. But what it actually does is it frees you up to go sit somewhere else or to stop jumping from one table to the other. And so in 2018, While yeah, I didn't like getting fired from CrossFit, I knew that I deserved it because I was juggling my attention still between three different places, and Tubrain was one. And the minute I got fired from CrossFit, I started going all in on Tubein and TwoBrain exploded. And we doubled again in that year. Also, when I got fired, I turned around to the managing editor, Mike Workington, and said, Hey, if this ever happens to you, call me up. I'll find a job for you. And um, you know, to my immense delight, that actually did happen not too long later. So being fired from the wrong job is a win for both sides. If a personal training client dumps you to go work with another personal trainer, you should see that as an opportunity to work on your core business. If uh a staff person leaves and they want to go sit at a different table, you should see that as an opportunity to fill their chair with somebody better. You need to look at firing as, you know, a blank slate. When a forest fire burns the forest down, that is an absolute tragedy. But a new species can grow up and flourish, and maybe it's better than what was there before. The weeds die with the trees, and the new trees grow back bigger and stronger and even more beautiful. Being fired from the wrong job is a win for both sides. And this lesson echoed again a few years later. But here's the thing business is um tough because you're the boss, right? Nobody can fire you. The way that you get fired from business is you go bankrupt. But sometimes even going bankrupt in a gym is very freeing because you get to come back and try it again. You don't only get one shot at this, right? There's nobody in the government that says one try only. If you failed as a gym and you've been out of the gym game for three years, you can start again. You can open a new gym. You're allowed, you have permission, and you're gonna do it without making all the mistakes that you did the first time. If you lose a client because of a pricing mistake or something that you said in anger, like I have, you can do better with somebody else. You can do better when you try it again. You can do better with the next client. Being fired by somebody is an opportunity, not just for self-reflection, but it's an opportunity to change what you're doing that benefits everybody. That was my top lesson from 2018. In 2019, um, I started working with a mentor named Marcy Swenson. Now, Marcy was actually uh really high up in business coaching in Google at the time. And we used to get on this call every couple of weeks, you know, for about a half an hour. And, you know, we were talking about staffing and management was still not my favorite thing to do. And I was talking about removing a staff person who just wasn't performing. This staff person was an amazing person, you know, she was a good coach, but the role that I had put her in, she was not great at. Uh, you know, she was busy, she was distracted, and I knew that I had to remove her, but I wanted to gain all the facts. And I said, you know, Marcy, like, what if I did this? What if I did that? What if I told her this? What if I rewrote the SOP? What if I let her do a job that was more flexible? And Marcy said, Chris, stop it. She said, Sometimes you think that you're being tactful or maybe polite, but really you're just hiding. And that was a big record scratch moment for me because all of us tend to procrastinate. We we want to wait to make a decision. We want to wait to take action, especially when something feels risky. And so we gather information, we get opinions from our friends, we ask five people, what would you do in this situation? We read books, we go to speakers, and we don't take any action. And in those times, we need to ask ourselves, do we have enough information? Are we just hiding? Making a decision has two parts. The first part is knowing what to do, and the second part is doing it. And most of us spend so much time trying to figure out what to do that we never actually do it. This is a massive mistake. And if you adopt the practice mindset, what you'll learn is like, I've got enough information to take the first step. I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna fire a bullet, I'll take the smallest possible step. And if I have to retreat, I'll do it and then I'll try something else. If it doesn't work perfectly, I'll fix it in the future. And maybe it actually will work. So you have to constantly ask yourself when you're faced with any crisis, like, do I need more information or do I know what to do? And I'm just hiding. In 2020, working with a mentor Todd Herman, um, author of The Alter Ego Effect, I learned something just as a sidebar in a conversation we were having called the COM model. My top lesson from 2020 was this, and I didn't know it at the time, but the COM model is an acronym that stands for clarity, assurance, leadership, movement. And remember what I said that you know, every every company is a media company now. Well, the reality is that you are a media company for your clients, your future clients, and also for your staff. And when crisis hits to your clients, to your staff, to your family, heaven forbid, this gives you a model so that you don't skip steps and and leave people scared. So clarity means here's exactly what happened. You start with the truth. You start by owning up to it. Okay. This is the mistake. Here's how bad it is, here's how many clients we've lost. You know, here's where our bank account sits. Assurance is it's gonna be okay. Things are bad, we have a plan. Leadership is here's what the future is going to look like if we follow the plan. And movement is let's do the first step together right now. Now, of course, in 2020, I was applying this in small ways in my own business. Clarity, assurance, leadership, movement. Clarity. Um, your classes are boring. People don't show up on time because they're not excited to be there. The assurance, I'm keeping you on staff because I know that you can do better. You're an exciting, fun person. I just need to help you get it out. Leadership. The way that we're going to do this is at the start of a class, you are going to say something funny, whatever, right? Movement. Let's go run the first class together and I'll show you what I mean. I was using it in small ways, ways that made incremental change, but nothing big. And then gym started getting locked down. Now, the calm model is what I used every single day for almost two years, as gyms were getting locked down, as gym owners were quitting, as they were failing on their lease payments, as they were sometimes fighting back in the wrong places or fighting back in the right places, as government agencies were calling, as these um big, you know, lobbies were kind of forming to fight the restrictions and the lockdowns. As I was getting criticism from the physicians in my own town, the calm model is not only how we produced so much helpful content for gym owners, but it's also how I got my gym through it. I had some staff turnover, key staff turnover, because they didn't want to get the vaccine. And, you know, I understood, but I still had to run my gym. And so when those two leaders left, the staff was really bummed. They love those two people. And so we started with clarity. Here's what's going on the assurance, your gym is still gonna be here. Leadership. I'm gonna step in and do the schedule and you know, I'll fill in the gaps if I have to and movement. Like, let's go work out. That calm model has served me so many times. We all think that we're just gonna be good under fire, that we'll know what to do, but we forget steps, right? Like maybe we can calm ourselves, but we forget to calm those around us. Or maybe we tell people to calm down, but we don't lead them into seeing like the brighter future. We don't create hope. Um, maybe we tell them what to do, but they don't see us doing it. And so they're like, oh yeah, whatever, you know, monkey see, monkey do. The calm model is really helpful. The stories we tell are really important and sticky. And as leaders, we have to become good storytellers, not fictional stories, not lies, but we have to tell stories. We have to tell stories about here's what the future holds, here's why we keep going, here's what we're gonna do together. We tell the story anyway, because the truth isn't always obvious or understood. This isn't about motivating people, it's about leading them. 2021, I learned the lesson of good operating conditions. You know, I had Jocko Willink at our summit that year. And one of the things that Jocko says, and I can't duplicate his voice, but you know, what he would talk about in his books is like the siege of Ramadi or whatever. And um, you know, things are bad. The weather's bad, we're low on ammo, we're low on food, morale sucks. Good because the enemy has the exact same problems. When it was raining outside, when it was snowing outside, he and his operators would start referring to that as good operating conditions because the enemy didn't want to fight either. The enemy was hot, the enemy was sweaty, the enemy was too tired to train, but he would train anyway, and his men would train anyway. And he would say, These are good operating conditions because it's stopping the opposition. In 2021, what was going on in the fitness world were gym closures. It was a black swan event. Uh, gyms that were anti-fragile, that had some cash, they were fine. And the gyms that cut back to core principles and core expenses, and they downsized and they kept only the essentials, they came out of the lockdowns going, Well, it wasn't great, but honestly, it made me do some stuff that I probably should have done anyway. For them, for those people who survived, the lockdown served as a forcing function to make the decisions that they had been avoiding. It was short-term pain for sure, but it was long-term gain. And so good operating conditions meant that they emerged into this new world in 2021 or 2022, and it's a brand new blue ocean. And all these clients are waiting, dying to go back to the gym, and there's fewer gyms to go to. And the people who would have started gyms in those years didn't start, and suddenly they've got this surge. You know, the average gym gained 8% the month uh in revenue, the month they opened above their previous peak, just because they survived. That resilience, that endurance is what got them through. They didn't have to be smarter, they didn't have to work harder, they just had to survive. Usually it was the gyms who were doing well before. They had their processes locked down, they had a little bit of a buffer, they had some extra cash, and they could just ride it out. You can simulate this. You can pretend that a crisis is about to happen again. We call this a pre-mortem and two-brain. Uh so you can do a pre-mortem exercise and say, like, what would happen right now that could kill us? Like, worst case scenario, what happens? What is the one thing that could knock us out of the game right now? That is you simulating, training for the operating conditions that make it hard for everybody else later. Okay. And if you do this premortem once a year, instead of waiting for a real crisis, you'll be far more likely to survive the real crisis when it happens. And so my lesson from 2021 was like, you have to think of crises as good operating conditions that nobody else is going to survive and fight through. Okay. One beautiful thing that happened to us, I mean, we cut expenses, we trimmed back down to core staff, you know, we lost only the weakest clients. We learned what was really important. There were a lot of like long-term blessings that came out of two years of lockdown for us. But one of the biggest things was that our critics were silenced. And I don't just mean like other gyms. We have a good relationship with most of the gyms in our town now, but I mean our critics in the healthcare field, they were gone. You know, the people who had made a living in our town attacking others, gone. The quote unquote influencers who were talking about fitness and not to do CrossFit or not to go to Catalyst, gone. They couldn't survive it. They didn't have the longevity that we did. 2022, my lesson was kind of like the flip side of surviving through tough conditions. It was peacetime versus wartime. You know, going into the COVID lockdowns for me, I had really good peacetime leadership. My gym was growing. Uh, the classes were just so fun. We had lots of personal training clients. The gym felt like your birthday party every single day. And maybe I'm like looking at it through rose-colored glasses, but that is kind of how it felt. When wartime hit and we were struck with crisis, these were not the leaders to lead us through wartime. But by the same token, the leaders who stepped up in wartime and said, let's get down to business, let's play by the book, let's do it exactly like this, let's cut these expenses, let's, you know, call every client every day, but talk for exactly one minute and no more. When the wartime was over, these were not the leaders to guide us into peacetime. And so while a lot of gyms were surging, we actually started to struggle. And our worst three months were after the restrictions had been lifted again. We were burned out, we were exhausted. Our wartime leaders were still at the turret, but they were jumpy, right? And they were like arguing with clients now and arguing with drop-ins and just kind of like still fighting. It was, I don't want to belittle PTSD by calling it PTSD, but they were still dealing with that traumatic event of closure. And so we had to switch again. The tactics and the people who lead you through wartime might not be the same tactics and people who lead you through peacetime. They might be good at survival, but they might not be good at growing. In fact, they might fight you through the jungle, but they might not lead you to safety and they might not help you grow a nation afterward. The value of sharing your mission and helping people find their spot in your vision is that you have a lot of people who can step up and take over. You know, hardly know when demigods go, the gods arrive. And the people who got you here might not be the people who get you there. It might not be their fault, it might not be your fault. Conditions change, and the people and the tactics that you use have to match the conditions that are present out there, right? You can't meet the surge with a broken surfboard. In 2023, the best lesson that I learned was that nobody else can make you happy. Likewise, you can't make anybody else happy. You have to make yourself happy. And that takes more work than making yourself fit. But physical fitness is an important part of being happy. Now, here's why this is important. If you're not happy in life, your gym will not survive. And so in 2023, I started getting out of my gym. I went back to the bicycle, I went back to the garage. I started working out on my own and finding joy. And then I brought that joy with me into my gym. Like the leaders who got me through COVID, I was burned out too. I was exhausted. We were producing COVID stuff every day, and that meant I had to go through newspapers and data and stats and produce something new every day for gym owners. And while I loved doing it, it was exhausting. I had to go find a state of flow. I had to relax my brain and come home happier. And that meant a happier gym, right? Fix the owner, fix the business. You see how these lessons echo? The first time I learned fix the owner, fix the business, it was because I said to a client, like, your lack of motivation is not my problem. She quit and never came back. A decade later, 15 years later almost, I learned that I needed to go fix myself before I started saying that to gym owners or to my staff at TwoBrain. I learned a lesson when it was still cheap to learn instead of when it could have been really expensive. So I started riding my bike. I started doing more flow state stuff, crossword puzzles. And I started focusing on the basics again, doing one thing every day to grow my business before doing anything else. I got back into the golden hour. I started my golden hour streak in 2023 and it's still alive today. Every day you do one thing to grow your business before you do anything else. It's probably the best book I've ever written. And the truth is that I did it because that's what makes me happy. That's what makes me satisfied. That's what makes me say I've had a successful day by having that one hour in the morning when I open my brain, I do a little brain dump, I get the junk out of there, I do one thing to grow my business, and then I turn to the biggest problem that I'm facing. Nobody else can make you happy. And if you're unhappy, your business will be unhappy. That was my top lesson of 2023. And my big takeaway was the golden hour. In 2024, I learned that something that I had picked up years ago that I had always thought to be true was not true. And this was the myth that talk to the smart kids and they will explain it to everyone else. Two-brain is massive. We work with a thousand gyms at a time. We have about 55 mentors on the team at a time. These are all successful gym owners who have been through our program. And we work one-on-one with everybody. These are very smart people. These are successful entrepreneurs. Some of them are more successful than I am. Most of them are smarter than I am. But years ago, I had heard from Greg Glassman talk to the smart kids and they will explain it to everybody else. That's actually not true. What happens when you tell something to a smart kid is they think about it a lot and they extrapolate. They make it bigger, they make it more complex. They add in other stories, other examples as their brain puts these parts together. They love solving the puzzle. They love painting a bigger picture. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That reminds me of that time. Oh, oh yeah, that lesson, yes, that also connects to this lesson. They make these connections. And so what happens is you share a little tidbit with somebody who's really smart, and they share an entire cookie with somebody else, and they in turn turn around and share like a meal with someone else when really you just needed to share the crumb. Talk to the smart kids and they'll explain it to everybody else, is false. As messages travel from you to your client or from you to um your coach, every time they pass through one other person, that message gets more watered down and complex. You probably didn't play this game as a kid because you're probably not as old as I am, but there's this game called telephone. And if you sit a bunch of eight-year-olds in a circle and you um start the first kid, you give them a word like blue, and they turn to the second kid and they say blue into their ear. And they turn to the third kid and they say blue. By the time the word comes all the way around the circle, it's a completely different word, fruit. What's where did that come from? And everybody laughs. Then you try it with a sentence. My cousin has a blue dress, and it comes all the way back around, and it's like, you know, uh, my yellow car is in the shop. Like it's completely different. Well, that's what happens with communication, especially when you're working with smart people all the time. You can say one thing, and by the time it reaches the third or the fourth person, they're going to hear something completely different. It's the way that our brains are wired, and it's especially true in smart people. There's this great analogy from um a book, I think it might have been in Setting the Table or one of those. And it was um, you know, the the writer visits this resort in Vietnam, and somehow this resort has gotten a Michelin star. And the author of the book is like riding in a gondola up the mountain, and he happens to be sitting with the director of hospitality for the resort. And he's he says to the director of hospitality, like, you guys are so remote, all of your staff come from these remote villages. Like, how do you train your staff to this level? I can't get my staff in in you know downtown Manhattan to deliver at this level. How do you do it with these villagers who don't even speak English, by the way? And the the um director of hospitality says, Well, we make it eighth or eight-year-old simple. And what she explained was when we bring people in, they haven't used like a knife and fork anymore, right? They don't sit on chairs to eat. Quite often they're sitting on the floor, or they might be using their fingers to eat, or it's just a different way of life. And so on the first day, we have to teach them as if we're teaching it to an eight year old. Here's how we sit in the chair. This is a knife and this is a fork. Now, of course, a lot of the villagers already know this. None of them are stupid, right? Like they know what a knife and fork are. But starting with eight year old simple means that nobody gets left behind. It means that you reinforce. The basics. You know, there's great basketball analogies for this, like, you know, or football analogies, like gentlemen, this is a football, starting with from that, starting from core principles, starting from the absolute basics. That's what's really important. What you have to understand is that every time you communicate to your staff, especially if they're smart, they are going to make the message more complex before it reaches your client. And so what you need to do is make your message as simple as possible, knowing that they will make it more complex, instead of starting with something complicated and counting on your staff to make it simpler and something the client can understand. And my top lesson from 2025 is that what we're selling is not exercise, it's not workouts, it's not programming, it's not a diet. What we're actually selling is hope. And the more I think about this, the more important it becomes. For the last 2,000 years, our species has evolved one generation at a time. Every generation has fought tooth and nail, survived wars, plagues, drought, starvation, disease, survived moving across the ocean and sinking ships and sometimes slavery or war to get to where we are now. And every generation's goal was simple: make it better for the next generation. Like give them a stronger foothold, give them more freedom, give them more wealth. Like don't let them starve or you know, don't let them be transcripted into war. Give them freedom. Just think about the kids, do it for the next generation. And every generation, more or less in a linear way, has gotten healthier and wealthier. There are things in our lives that we take for granted, like having a sip of coffee that the king of England could not have imagined as possible 150 years ago. Like, you know, we were really not just born on third base. We were born on the one-yard line, really, from where our species started out. And now we're at this turning point where for the first time in history, lifespan is shortening. We are likely to die, statistically speaking, at a younger age than our parents were. Not by years, just by, you know, weeks. But that is getting worse and worse and worse. Lifespan is shortening and health span, the amount of time during our life which we are actually healthy and fit and we have physical autonomy and mental autonomy, that's getting shorter even faster. We're living longer, but we're sick at the end for a longer period of time and we're less and less happy. All of our generations of humans, all of our evolution has led up to this moment, and it feels like we're failing. We're not capitalizing on the thing that we've been building toward. But there is hope. There is the potential for a brighter future with a longer lifespan, a longer health span, and more happiness and more wealth. There is another level, but that level will not be achieved by the ruling party, by governments, by lobbies, by unions. It will not be achieved by what's going on in the stock market or not going on in the stock market. It will not be achieved by early acquisition of crypto or what you tell the AI. It will not be achieved by how many followers you have on Instagram. It will only be achieved through coaching. And the most important thing that we sell as coaches is hope. Other people are frustrated. They think they're in dead-end jobs. They don't see a future. They're scared of AI. They're worried that their kids are so unhappy and sad. They're doing drugs, they're drinking too much, they're jumping from relationship to relationship, they don't go to church anymore, they don't have any structure in their lives, they don't have a clear value system. You know, what are they aiming for? Well, what we can give these people is hope. We can paint a clear picture of a better future for them better than anybody else in the world can. And we can give them the first step to get there. This is how you create hope. You create a clearer picture of a brighter future and you take the first step to get there. And every time you take another step, that future gets brighter and hope gets built. We are agents of hope. We are salespeople of hope. Hope is what we sell, hope is what we deliver. That has never been more true than it is right now. And once you understand that, our job becomes not just a privilege, it becomes a responsibility. That means we all have to make a good income for ourselves and our families. It means that we have to provide a stable gym that lasts 20, 30 years so that our coaches can stay around and make a career, but our clients can find hope. Most of our clients don't go to church anymore. Most of our clients don't have an inspirational politician that they look up to. Most of our clients have seen the flaws in the influencers that they follow. They're wary, they're skeptical, they're not happy. We can be the place that gives them hope when they can't find that place anywhere else. We can be the place that says you're doing a good job when they're not hearing that from their husband or their job or anywhere else. We can be the people who say you're doing it right. We'll see it tomorrow. That's our job now. And that's my top lesson from 2025. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. This has been a long episode, but I took some leeway with it because I have run a profitable gym for many years. It didn't start that way. And I don't want you to have to go through the same pain that I went through. Hopefully, the lessons that I've learned, the bruises, the cuts, the abrasions, the scars, the burns that I've sustained don't have to be repeated with you. If you want help, just reach out. Talk to my team, and we'll get you paired up with a mentor like I was.