CrossFit's Sale: Stop Watching YouTube, Start Running Your Business

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper explains why gym owners need to stop consuming clickbait speculation about CrossFit’s sale and start working on what actually matters: their businesses.

Stop paying the “distraction tax”—hours spent watching videos, scrolling comments and worrying about things you can’t control cost you opportunities to generate revenue, build client relationships and preserve decision-making capacity.

To give you a concrete plan to improve your business in a time of uncertainty, Coop walks through a five-step process you can use to objectively measure the value of any gym affiliation using real numbers:

✅ Check local search volume for the brand
✅ Track where your leads come from
✅ Calculate marketing ROI with a simple formula
✅ Measure revenue from affiliation programs
✅ Assess retention value among engaged members

If you decide to rebrand, Chris also covers the true costs, from domain changes and social media updates to new signage and content, so you understand what’s actually required.

The key takeaway: CrossFit LLC (or any brand affiliation) has never had less impact on your success than right now. Your coaching, client relationships and business systems actually drive results.

Watch this episode to get the decision-making framework that will help you make smart, data-driven choices about affiliation. Then get back to work.

Links

Measuring the Value of Affiliation

The True Costs of Rebranding

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

1:09 - Don’t get distracted

2:53 - Help with affiliation decision

9:31 - A rebranding plan

12:48 - Get back to work

14:15 - The decision to make now

Transcript

Chris 0:02

Last week, hundreds of gym owners spent hours watching a clickbait video speculating about CrossFit sale. Again, let me save you two hours right now. Watching that video will not help your business. Reading speculative articles about the sale of CrossFit before there's actually a sale will not help your business. Making guesses about guesses that other people are making will not help your business. Getting anxious about things that you can't control also won't help your business. On March 12th, 2025, CrossFit HQ announced that they were for sale. That was nine months ago. And since then, there's been complete silence from HQ about a pending sale or these supposed suitors. But nature abhors a vacuum, and so speculation starts to fill it. And this creates a pattern of anxiety and distraction and time wasted and no progress on what actually matters. Today I want to talk about the distraction tax, what's happening to suck you into these videos and blog posts about what might happen in the future, but we don't know, and what you should be doing instead. First, the distraction tax. A two-hour video about conjecture and guesses that's documents that are written by AI that costs you two hours of revenue generating activity. And scrolling through the comments is even worse. Reading 200 comments about other people's speculation on top of somebody else's guesses costs you customer service time. Worrying about CrossFit HQ's next move costs you sleep and decision-making capacity. And none of this moves your business forward. The truth is that you can't control when HQ announces anything. You can't control who buys them. You can't control what the new ownership will do. But here's what you can control: your business, your metrics, your client relationships, your pricing, your retention. You don't have to feel like you're just waiting and hoping for somebody else to dictate the course or the success of your business. You could take control of that right now. You gotta break this pattern though. Every time CrossFitHQ or some tangential media source makes or doesn't make an announcement, you can get out of this cycle of paying attention and watching and waiting with your fingers crossed or arguing online, right? You can stop refreshing Reddit or watching YouTube videos or speculating in Facebook groups. Instead, you can start working on your business, right? Because your business is idling while you're doing all of that other stuff that doesn't actually matter. You can start to trust yourself when HQ actually does announce something concrete, like an actual buyer or actual changes and actual new policies, then you will have the real information to make a real decision. And here's the thing: you're smart enough to make that decision when the time comes. You don't need to rehearse it 50 times in your head based on made-up scenarios that you read online. Okay? Today I'm gonna give you the decision-making framework so that no matter what happens, you'll be able to make a decision that will benefit your gym, your family, your staff, your community. All you have to do is just apply this framework, no matter what the outcome of the CrossFit sale. Okay? So when the time just comes to actually decide what to do about your affiliation, here's how you do it. And I broke this down in an article called Measuring the Value of Affiliation. There's a five-step framework to evaluate whether you should maintain your affiliation or not. So the first step is to check search volume in your area. Look at Google Trends or a keyword planner. Do a search for CrossFit Near Me, right? So CrossFit Near Me in Sault Ste. Marie or CrossFit Near Me in Los Angeles or wherever you are. If people are searching for it locally, then it has value, right? People are looking for the brand. And this is data, not speculation. Yes, maybe it holds value historically to you and it's near and dear to your heart because you've got a history with the brand, but these are sunk costs. These don't tell you whether the brand is going to have any actual tangential value to uh or tangible value to your business in the future. If people are not searching for the term CrossFit locally, it doesn't necessarily mean there's an opportunity there. It means that either you're going into a market that's never heard of CrossFit, doubtful, but possible, and you're educating that market, or it means nobody's really looking for it anymore. Make your decision based on that. The first step is, you know, look at the search history. The second step is to track your leads. So every new client that's coming into your gym right now, you want to start asking, how'd you hear about us? and record their answer consistently. You can start doing this now just to kind of build up a case for affiliation or deaffiliation when the time comes. If you've got a certain percent who are coming in because of the CrossFit brand, then you know exactly what you're getting from your affiliation. So if 40% of the people who come through your door come from CrossFit searches or say, oh, I've been following CrossFit or I want to try CrossFit or whatever, and you get 10 leads a month, that's four leads a month worth of value. Okay, so that's step two. Step three is to calculate your marketing ROI. So now you want to take a look at the formula leads per month times your front-end offer price times 12 months. So for example, if you're getting five leads a month from people who say CrossFit and you're selling an on-ramp for$500 and um you're doing that every month for 12 months, then you can easily figure out what the value of CrossFit affiliation is to you. So if you're getting five leads a month who say CrossFit and you're selling on-ramp for 500 bucks times 12 months, that's$30,000 a year in brand value. That's an amazing ROI, right? And the because the annual fee right now is$4,500. And if it changes with a new owner, then you can just measure that against the value that you're getting from it, right? And it becomes this objective measuring tool instead of just saying, like, is it worth it or not? Because right now, you know, at$4,500 a year, if you're getting$30,000 a year in value from it, that's a 6.6 times return on your investment. That's a great ROI. However, if you're not selling it on-ramp, you're not getting leads to say CrossFit, or the price goes up, that ROI is going to change. Okay? Step four is to calculate revenue from affiliation programs. So if you run specialty programs like the open or competitions, then you can calculate the number of people who sign up for that times the price times the frequency per year that you run them. So if you're using CrossFit in the name of this event and you've got 15 people signing up for it at, you know, 99 bucks and you're doing this four times a year, that's$5,940. Against the annual fee of$4,500, you know, you're getting a decent ROI, right? So that's that's helpful. I'll use another example, which is HyROX. So right now, HyROX is$130 a month. And if you're selling HighROX memberships for even$99 a month and you're selling it to 10 people a month, well, then you know you're getting like an 8X ROI because, you know, eight people paying$100 a month compared to$130 that you're paying out, easy ROI. You can do the same with CrossFit. If you're running CrossFit style competitions or CrossFit specific classes, okay? The fifth part of the framework, the last calculation you want to make is retention ROI. So you want to look at like how many people did the CrossFit open at your gym this year? How many people booked a trip and went out to watch the games, how many engage with CrossFitFit specific content? You know, they they follow the CrossFit games winners on Instagram or or they bring up CrossFit in class, right? You can measure these things. It's not easy to measure them, but you can absolutely measure them. And, you know, I while I hate surveys, you can quickly do a little survey of your clients and say, like, do you plan to go to the games? Did you do the open last year, et cetera? And then what you do is you multiply that number by your monthly membership rate. So if you got 30 people who did the open, or or you know, 30 people who went to the CrossFit games, or 30 people who come back and say, Yeah, I follow CrossFit influencers, and they each pay 150 a month, well, there's$4,500, right? And that's your break even on the CrossFit affiliation fee. So what you want to do is you want to add these things up. You want to look at the Google searches, you want to look at the leads compared to your front-end revenue, you wanna be looking at people who sign up for CrossFit specific things in your gym, or you want to be looking at the retention value too, okay? But the point here is that these are all measurable. You can run these numbers today. It might take you an hour to figure it out, but then your decision is made and you can stop worrying about it. You don't need to wait for an announcement to know whether affiliation makes financial sense for you. You can do this objectively with clarity instead of just guessing and weighing the pros and cons or doing what I did. Uh last time it sold, Dave Castro called me and said, like, give us a year, and that's what I did. And then after a year, I was like, maybe I'll give them another year, and I did that, and then finally just said, okay, look, like the ROI doesn't weigh up for me. That doesn't mean I'll never reaffiliate, and it doesn't mean that you don't ha you can't reaffiliate later either. But the reality is that, you know, if things don't objectively measure up to give your business a good ROI, uh, well, then you've got a tougher decision to make. And I get it, you know, brand loyalty, you know, there's a there's a long CrossFit history, there's a story. It was hard for me to give up a 17-year affiliation, but I know that I can always go back if I want to. When I did the exercise, I saw quickly that the RLI just wasn't there for my gym. My gym had a good, strong Catalyst Fitness brand in Sault Ste. Marie anyway. And so when I did these metrics, I mean, it it was very imbalanced, the ROI that I was getting, and so I just ended it. Now let's talk about what to do if you do plan to execute, because a lot of you will do this exercise and say, actually, I'm getting a much better return on this investment than I thought, and you'll become even more loyal to the CrossFit brand. That's great. That's the point of an objective exercise. If you decide to de-affiliate, though, or or you're just changing your brands, even if you're not a CrossFit gym, this part is important. If and when you decide to change your brands, then you wanna read the article, the true costs of rebranding, because it actually takes a lot more than just the digital changes or like changing your sign, right? So the first thing is you've gotta make, you've got to get a new domain if your domain currently contains the name CrossFit or whatever you're licensing, right? You've probably got to change all your email addresses. That means you've got to change every password that's tied to that email, right? So you've got to change that. You've probably got to change your Google business profile and your Facebook page and your Instagram accounts. If you have Yelp or any other directory listings, you've got to change those. You've got to change your lead capture forms, you've got to scrub your website content to make sure it doesn't mention brands. That means you've got to set up some 301 redirects. That means you've got to update your Google Analytics if you're using that, and I hope you are. You've got to make some physical changes too. Uh you've got external signage, you've got internal signage. If you've got uh the word CrossFit in your logo, you're gonna have to change that. You're going to have to change your um letterhead business cards if you're sending out quotes to people. This is important. Your orientation packages, if you're sending videos to people that are branded CrossFit, or if you're giving them like a binder when they sign up. Um you've also got to change your content. You've got to change the class names on your schedule in your um software, your billing software. You've got to change your founder story. Any mentions throughout your site, they'll go after you for that. If your coach uh BIOS reference CrossFit credentials, you can leave those because they they've uh bought the right to say that they are CrossFit certified, but you still can't call it a CrossFit class, right? So there's real costs associated with all this. It's probably gonna be 20 to 40 hours of admin work. It's not just flipping a switch. It's probably gonna cost you two to five thousand dollars for uh new design, new signage, technical work. And this means that your attention is gonna be pulled from revenue generating activities while you're doing it. If um you're using the SEO that you're getting right now, you can expect traffic to drop if you don't have your own brand because people are no longer searching for you anymore, right? They're not finding you through a CrossFit search. But here's the most important part, and this is kind of like the foundation of all of it. You have to start telling your own story. You can't rely on CrossFit media anymore. It's it's gone anyway, for all intents and purposes. You need to create your own content. That means you need to tell your story. Why did you open your gym? You need to tell your clients' stories, ask them their best gym story. You need to teach something. You need to write about protein or shoot a video about lifting for grammas or running for weight loss. The stories that you tell are your brand. Whether you're affiliated or not, you need to own your own narrative. And that's really important. And it's the message that I've been sharing since at least 2017 is that you need to tell your own story. And whether you are part of CrossFit or not part of CrossFit, it's your story that's going to matter long term. Okay. Here's the most important thing though. Get back to work. The bottom line is that CrossFit HQ has never had less impact on your success or your failure than they do right now. Think about it, the CrossFit journal is gone. CrossFit Media's daily content is gone. The massive marketing machine is gutted. The exposure that you once got on ESPN2 and other places, pretty much nonexistent. The educational seminars are scaled back. What does HQ provide now? They provide a brand name, which you can measure the value of if you go through the steps I mentioned earlier. They provide the open, which you can measure participation in. They provide the games, which drives far less traffic than it used to. And they might provide some local search benefit, which again, you can measure. Everything else that makes your gym successful is you. It's your coaching, your community, your client relationships, your retention systems, your sales process, your pricing strategy, your staff happiness, your staff energy, your staff culture, your programming. None of that comes from HQ. And whether you're a CrossFit gym or you're licensing any other brand, I'm gonna bet all of that comes from you. The gym owners who are thriving right now, whether they are CrossFit or a HyROX affiliate or F45, a Parisi affiliate, a Metfix affiliate, or completely independent, they all have something in common. They stopped waiting for somebody else to grow their business and they started building it themselves. Here's the decision you need to make right now. It's not, should I stay affiliated or not? Because you don't have enough information yet to make the decision. The decision is will I let speculation distract me from building my business? When CrossFit HQ makes an actual announcement, go to the measuring affiliation value article that I'm going to link below or come back and watch this video and just do the math. Run the numbers, make your decision based on data objectively. If you're staying, great, get back to work. If you're leaving, follow the rebrand checklist and then get back to work. Until then, stop watching clickbaity videos. Stop reading speculation or getting in fights in the comment section or even browsing other people's comments. Stop rehearsing decisions based on made-up scenarios that will probably never exist. Get back to work on the things that you can control. So here is your to-do list today. Number one, review your lead sources. Do you even track them? You should. And that will help you make an actual educated decision later. Second, check your retention metrics. Are you tracking those? Third, look at your pricing. When's the last time that you changed your rates? Fourth, audit your client communication. Are you telling your story? Are you telling it three times a day? Remember, the gym owners who win aren't the ones who can predict the future. They are the ones who build sustainable businesses regardless of what external forces like HQ or the market does. Now, close YouTube, close Facebook, close your Reddit, and get back to work. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And you do not run a profitable gym by reading the comments from other people you don't know or watching speculative videos from people who don't know what's gonna happen.