The Gym Competition That Boosts Revenue, Retention and Referrals

If you put all your clients on podiums and celebrate their achievements, they'll stay longer and you'll earn more.

Today on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper breaks down the in-house competition he’s refined over 15 years: the Intramural Open. The four-week event can be run completely on its own or combined with the CrossFit Games Open.

Two-Brain's signature fun competition is a win for everyone: Clients get podium moments they can’t get anywhere else, and gym owners see measurable improvements in retention and average revenue per member. Plus, Coop has added a special bring-a-friend workout that's an A+ marketing opportunity.

From setup logistics to post-competition revenue boosters, Coop lays out the exact steps for running a successful team competition in your gym. You’ll even learn how to offer pre-event programs and specialty clinics to generate additional revenue before the competition begins.

Chris also shares survival tips to avoid burnout and refresh the open if you've run the event before.

If you’re ready to boost revenue and retention and fill your gym with good vibes to start 2026, this episode is for you!

To download the Intramural Open guide, head to Gym Owners United via the link below.

Links

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

8:04 - Setting up the Intramural Open

11:51 - Pre-open activities

18:14 - Points and scoring

23:51 - Results = more money

28:28 - How to refresh the open

Transcript

Chris 0:02

One of the coolest things that we do in TubeRain every year is called the Intramural Open. This is an in-house competition that's a win for everybody. It's amazing for your clients. It's amazing for your staff. It doesn't burn them out. And it's great for you, the owner, because it boosts retention and revenue. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And one of the ways that you run a profitable gym is by having an amazing, exciting culture where people are striving to get better. The way they measure themselves is an annual competition called the Intramural Open. If you want this guide, which I'm going to walk you through in a moment, just send me a DM and I'll give it to you for free. We've been doing this since 2013. I started running an intramural open in my gym catalyst in 2012. Back then, CrossFit had just rolled out their online CrossFit Open event. And I thought, how can I make this even better than what it already is? The first year that we ran it, the CrossFit Open was great for the clients. They loved challenging themselves. They loved looking forward to the challenges. And we were even smart enough to have them invite their friends and family to watch. The atmosphere was amazing. But after five or six weeks, I was exhausted. The coaches were burned out. We had like lost money on this thing because we'd been providing coffee and you know, giving t-shirts to people and stuff. And so while it felt like an amazing win for the clients, it really didn't feel like a great win for the gym overall. The next year, 2013, I thought back to my intramural experience in high school. Now, my high school in northern Canada was a little bit like Hogwarts. On the first day as a freshman, you were drafted into one of four houses. I was drafted into the Panthers' house. I didn't know anybody, but I quickly made friends because all of the other people in my homeroom were doing the same intramural events that I was. And so I would see them at volleyball at lunchtime, and I would see them uh at you know cards in two weeks or whatever the different events were. All year long, we were sucked into playing sports and games every single day at lunchtime because there was nothing else to do at this rural high school. But it was a very sticky event. You quickly made friends and you quickly got addicted. I met my wife, who is also a Panther, and both of my kids were drafted into the Panther's house at the same high school years later. I wanted to give that experience to my members. And so in 2013, not only did we roll out the intramural open for our members, but we made it free to people through my blog too. Many gyms started copying this. And by 2014, the CrossFit Journal was writing about the intramural open experience. And by 2015, non-crossfit gyms were doing it too. I want to help you whether you're a CrossFit gym doing the CrossFit Open and using the Intramural Open framework to host those workouts, or you're a gym that's never done a competition and you want to host your first. The intramural open is an amazing template for that too. So let's get into the guide here. I'm going to walk you through it step by step. Again, if you want to copy this guide, all you got to do is shoot me a DM on Facebook and I will make sure that you get it right in your inbox right away so that you can start prepping and building your intramural open experience now. This is the cover of the guide that you're looking for. You just find me on Facebook, shoot me a DM. Hey Coop, can I have the intramural open guide for 2026, please? And I'm happy to give it to you. The cover says every member on a podium. And that is the goal here. Remember, you have the only place in your client's life where they get to feel like they are accomplishing anything. Probably. They might feel like they're getting their work done at work, but nobody is saying to them, you did that better than you've ever done it. Nobody's saying to them, great job. Nobody's saying to them, that is your personal best work. The only place they're getting put on any kind of podium in their lives is in your gym, right? Their spouse is not saying that's the best meal you've ever made. Um, their kids are not saying you are getting better and better and better at providing for us. None of that. The only place they get a spotlight in a podium is in your gym. Now, podiums are super addictive. And so the more opportunities we create in our gyms to put people on podiums, no matter what that podium is, you know, first double under, first pull up, first front squat, you know, first, you know, competition, whatever, the more opportunities we create to put them on podiums, the stickier our gym is because people evolve to become the heroes of their own story. And the intramural open is one more story that we can give them that they can't get anywhere else. It's another experience. And so in this guide, I'm gonna walk you through the various steps to actually building these peak moments. Okay. And you can do this throughout the year too. The intramural open should be like the highlight of your year. This will take a little bit more work than other podium experiences will take, but it is so worth it, especially because it's amazing for the clients. We're gonna use it as a referral opportunity to bring their friends and family into the gym and cheer for them, show them off. And we're also gonna make this a win for your coaches by getting them paid for the extra time and a win for you by improving your ARM and retention too. Okay. Now, this guide is pretty thorough because I want to give you all the steps with nothing left out. But if you have questions, just go to our free group, gymownersunited.com, or even better, ask your two-brain mentor on how they've implemented this at their gym. All right. So here's the story. You know, if you this is my original gym back here, I think I've got a graphic from like 2014 or something. And um, what you can see is we used to just put things up on this big chalkboard painted on the cinder blocks, you know, and later on things evolved. I'll show you some pictures later of big flags in my gym where we started running a draft because that was super duper fun. We started having meals, we started hanging these banners every single year. You know, one of the coolest decorations in my gym right now is that there's over a dozen of these banners from the intramural open winning team every single year. Later on, we added points uh so that people would get awards for spirit. People started showing up in costume, and you can evolve or you can stick to the basics and still have just an amazing fun event. As you can see on the right hand side here, I was just using a spreadsheet. That was just a screenshot, basically, that I posted. You don't need fancy software to do this stuff, uh, even though software has evolved to you know kind of encapsulate the intramural open, I think CrossFit might still be using their software too, although I'm not sure. All right. So we've been talking about this since 2011. We've really got it dialed right now. The first thing that I want to do is just kind of give you like the timeline for setup. So you want to start now. Okay, it's early January. This does take a little bit of prep work, but again, I'm gonna make sure that it's worthwhile for you and your coaches and your clients and their friends and family, not just like a celebration for the client that's gonna burn you out and lose your money. All right. First, you're gonna launch some pre-event programs. So the one of the ways that this makes you money is that people want to succeed at this. When they sign up for a challenge, they wanna win it. And so you can have pre-event programs. You can start out with like six-week groups for weightlifting or six-week groups for double unders or whatever. Most of you, 80% of you are going to be programming your own events for this competition. So you can tailor those events to the things that your gym is good at. If you don't do snatches at your gym, don't put snatches in the competition. Uh, if you do snatches in the gym, put it in there. You know, you can add weightlifting, you can add whatever you want. We typically save one event as a surprise and make it something just really fun. Like we play road hockey some years. Uh, we've had a biathlon where people would row and then they'd have to shoot pie plates with nerf guns after the row, et cetera. Okay. Um, this is your timeline. And this is going to tell you like, here's basically the work that's coming ahead. Now, the guide is going to walk you through all this step by step. Don't worry. This is a 26-page guide. It's very thorough. If you want more help, how do I know what to set my prices at? Where do I get my t-shirts? Talk to your mentor. Okay. They can break the big challenge down into even smaller pieces and help you step by step by step. So let's start going through this because what I tried to do is just break this big project down into small weekly steps for you. All right. So, first off, we want to set up our activities. So the first thing that we want to do is figure out like how many teams do we want? How do we choose captains for the team? How do we make the process of being selected uh inclusive and fun instead of having somebody feel like they're the last one picked? Okay. So the first thing that you want to do is set a price for doing this event. I recommend$50 and up. I know a lot of two-brand gyms go to 100. What you want to do is you want to have a price that actually means something so that people, when they pay the price, they are committed. If I'm paying 20 bucks for something and I'm getting a free t-shirt, I'm not going to train extra hard for it. But if I have to pay$100 for it, yeah, I'm really going to put some thought into it. I want to do my best. I'm going to train hard. And that's going to hold me accountable to showing up in the gym for the next two months, if nothing else. I might even sign up for a specialty program to work on my weaknesses if I want to make faster progress at that. So let's say, for example, that I want to get better at clean and jerk. And I know that clean and jerk comes up in my gym's programming once, maybe twice a week. And I'm going to get some coaching on that. But if I want to improve faster, there's a specialty program happening for six weeks that will let me do that. Or if I want to improve faster, I can do some personal training uh sessions to help me improve on that too. So you want to make sure that people have the opportunity to improve more rapidly than your general programming when they want it. Okay. So that's the first thing. You want to set a price for the event and you want to tell people like, hey, if you need to work on your double unders, if you work need to work on your knees to elbows or whatever, you're rowing, we've got a clinic for that. A few ways you can do it. I just mentioned running a six-week specialty group. That's one way. The second way is to have like a weekend specialty program. So these are four techniques, uh, but you can run them on consecutive Saturdays. The first Saturday is rowing technique, the second Saturday is weightlifting technique, the third Saturday is powerlifting technique, the fourth Saturday is like skills and drills where you're doing double unders, knees to elbows, stuff like that. These are for people who just need like tips on getting better at competition. Okay. So you're going to set your prices. You've you've already got your personal training prices, I'm sure. If you're going to run these specialty comps on the weekend, make sure that it's worth you showing up or paying a coach for. Charge more than people would pay for their regular classes and do not make this free. The goal of the intramural open is not to have you working harder to make the same amount of money. You want to charge for these because it's optional. It's for people who want to go faster in certain elements. The next step is to select some captains. So you're going to have a draft, and the draft is going to be fun. Nobody's going to feel like they were the last one picked or anything like that. The uh captains really need to be the people in your gym who are going to encourage other people to show up. It's attendance that matters more than anything else, not outcomes, not results. So your captains for that reason should probably not be coaches. They should be the members who show up every single day with batteries included, the connectors, the people who seem to know everybody, the first people to welcome a new person in class, you know, the socialites. Okay. These are the captains that you want. You want probably three or four if you've got a gym of 150 people and you think we can probably get 90 to 100 to sign up. These people are going to need to put some time in. They're going to need to recruit people. It's going to be fun, but they can't just expect to show up at the first event. They're going to need to be doing some social stuff. Okay. The next thing is you need to set up scoring. Now I've got a sample score sheet for you. Okay. Um, down here later in the guide. And again, if you want this guide, just you know, hit me up on Facebook, send me a DM, say, can I have the intramural open guide? Okay. If you spell it right, I'll get it to you faster. Just kidding. After you set this up, the scoring, you can set up divisions. Now, this is where you might want to think about like RX and scaled. You might want to set up divisions by age. It's up to you. You know, if you have a big youth training program in your gym, you might want to set it up by different categories there. Um, the thing you want to do is keep it as simple as you can. I tend not to do divisions. I do like an RX and scaled, and that is it. Then the next thing is you want to set up your open registration. So put your open registration link on your booking and billing software. If this is like a one-day thing, you know, set that up in kilo or push press or What-Fi, whatever you're using, so that people can register on Pay Online. The last thing you want to do is be the middleman where people need to contact you to sign up. You got to make this as easy as you can. Now, what you want to do is set up a draft day. Okay. So this is going to be fun. You've got your captains. They are Mary and Joe. Let's say I've only got two captains. Draft day is going to be February the first, February the 15th. You pick a day. You're going to tell them, pick a team name first. Okay. Then you're going to make up a private Facebook group or a private WhatsApp chat channel for each of those groups and put the captain in charge of that. All right. Now you're going to take out your client list and you're going to say, okay, here are the people who are going to be really serious competitors. Let's divide those up and have you draft from those people first. And then from there, they can draft the rest of the client list. They can add people on Facebook. They can add people, you know, through DM, email, whatever, right? You're not giving out client information. So make sure that your coaches know how to find your members online. Probably Facebook is going to be the easiest because they're using their real name. The way this worked best for us is we took one year four captains out for wings, and we went to this bar and we had the client list, and every captain had a copy of this client list. And first we went through kind of the more competitive people. There were about 20, and they did the actual draft. I pick Joseph, I pick Mary, whatever. Then we said, okay, now fill up your team. Go ahead. Here's the client list. Go out and recruit. So you're not drafting the average client because, again, you don't want anybody to feel like they're the last one picked. Instead, you're recruiting them. So the captains were quickly DMing people: join my team, join my team. You want to be on this team. And what actually happened was that we filled four teams really quickly. They all got to 20 members, 20 people. And then I said, okay, now move on. Like get as many as you can. And the teams knew that the attendance points were so critical that if they got 40 people on their team and other people only had 30, they had a massive advantage and a really good shot of winning. Okay. Now you can stream this on social. The way that you do it is you don't have a draft. I pick this person, I pick this person. What you do is you have your draft for your competitive people if you want to, and then you have all of your clients' names printed out and put in a fishbowl. And then you go, uh, you know, coach or captain by captain. The first captain is the captain of the Panthers. Okay, they reach in the fishbowl. I pick Joseph. Whoa, yes, Joseph, welcome to the Panthers. Awesome, you know. And then the next person goes, okay, the next is the the Kings team, you know, whatever. They can make up funny names. They reach in the in the fishbowl, they pick out the name. Mary, welcome to the Kings. Congratulations. Right. And you you just go through the draft that way. Maybe you change up the draft order every round or whatever, but you want people picked. You want people to feel like they are already uh requested to be on a team. Now, some members will feel like, I don't know if I want to do this, but they've got this captain, this person from their gym approaching them and not Coop. That's really important because they know that Chris is going to try and talk me into stuff. They know the coaches are there to try and talk them into stuff. But when they get that request from Betty Lou, will you come and help my team? They're way more likely to say yes to a peer than to you. Okay. That's something. Some of the members really took it to heart and said, like, hey, all four of you have approached me. Uh, you know, what are you gonna do for me? How are you gonna get me on the team? How are you gonna earn my place? And so the captains would have to do funny things to get them onto the team. One guy made up his own like wanted poster and stuck it all around the gym and was like, Hey, let's see who's gonna earn my earn me on their team, right? He wasn't a top athlete, he was just a fun-loving guy. And this is what happens when you set up the framework properly. All these things just organically happen in your gym. It's an outlet for creativity, it's an outlet for fun. And that's what the intramural open is really all about. So, draft day, I've got the step-by-step in here. Okay. You've got this short-term recruitment period. Okay, guys, in the next seven days, build up your team, recruit as many people as you can. And again, now you've got your peers out there in your community recruiting people to do this event instead of you, you know, talking about it on Facebook and Instagram and putting up notices all over your gym. Okay. That's what's powerful, and that's like the best way to recruit people. Now I want to talk a little bit about pre-open programming. Remember, the goal of the open is to put people on podiums, it's to help people be successful. It is not to separate the best athletes from the worst. It's not to get a ranking of who's the most fit in your gym. That's not what this competition is about. This competition is about helping people win, period. Okay. If somebody comes across as like the alpha female in your gym, we've kind of missed the point here. Instead, we want everybody to feel like they are the fittest they have ever been in their lives. That is the point of the intramural open to show people you are as fit as you've ever been. So the pre-open programming, I have a little blurb here on it. That's really important. You want to have things in your programming that they're going to see in your competition. The last thing you want in your competition is for people to be like, I've never done a double under before. Oh my God, I feel like a failure. All right. Now I am especially sensitive to this because when I started doing intramural events in my high school, I was not an athlete. I was a total nerd. And having some events that made me feel like, oh, I could be good at this, encouraged me to do the other events where I was definitely not going to be good at. All right. So that make sure that you're including everything in your programming, even if you're doing like a release every week where you're telling people the workouts and you're doing this big like release party or whatever. Now, I've got a step-by-step here on points and scoring. The point, again, is not to say like these are the fittest people in our town or whatever. The point is to include everybody and get people to show up and feel like they are at their personal best. So most of the points are going to be given out for participation. Now, you want to, you'll see that number one, teams are given one point for every person that completes every open workout. But then you can also give three points for people who perform at their best because you do want to push them to perform. Okay. And then the best, and this is a great idea, is the spirit of the open award. Every week you're going to have a five-point award for somebody who's the spirit of the open. And that means you can have themes. Hey, we have beach themes. There's pictures on my website of people showing up in beach clothes. Uh, there was like a vacation theme one year where people like dress up as Disney characters, you know. That's not something I would pick, but it's something the captains and the coaches chose. Super cool. Uh, we had hockey one week, you know, of course, because we're in northern Ontario. So everybody shows up in their hockey gear and does the workout. Okay. The events, I mean, this is the part that's going to be the most fun for most of you is actually programming the events. But what you've got to remember is that it has to feel exciting, it has to feel like there's a sense of anticipation. Like it doesn't have to be like max clean a jerk, max 5k runtime, you know, fastest 3K row. You want it to be fun. You want it to be like people hitting PRs, doing things for the first time, that's amazing. But giving people a reason to get their picture taken. Okay. Keep that in mind. Now, if the goal is like seven minutes of burpees, arguably, okay, that's a fitness test of stamina, whatever. But you know, it's not something that people are going to be posting all over Instagram. If it's like, I did it. I, you know, pressed this weight over my head. I got my first pull-up. Like, think of first, think of stories that they can tell. And the simpler the story, the better. So if they go to a party right after the competition and somebody's like, Wow, how come your face is so pink? Well, you know, we did seven minutes of herpes. That doesn't sound fun. But if they say something like, I got my first pull-up, then their friends are going to be like, Oh my God, like let's talk about that. I've never done a pull-up. I can never do a pull up, right? Like you want to have firsts. Um, if it's a complicated explanation, you know, it's it's not as good of a story. So keep it really simple, keep your programming simple, keep it super duper fun, and keep it to something that like people can win at. All right. They either get their first or like an obvious best. So I've got some tips here on like, you know, some of the some of the workouts that we've done. I just wanted to give you a template and don't overthink it, right? Like the programming might be the fun part for us, but it's also the part that we're most likely to think too much about. So I've given you some workouts, and if this is your first year doing the intramural open, just copy these. So I've got a super meet, right? Super duper fun, heavy lifting, and it's a combo. You can divide by their body weight if you want to, or whatever. Second is uh sort of Cindy, a CrossFit classic. Okay. So as many rounds and reps and possi as possible in 20 minutes of pull-ups, push-ups, and kettlebell swings instead of air squats. But again, you could just sub it for Cindy if you want to, or you can copy what I've got. And then we've got kind of like a uh high rocks event, okay? It's a high rocks inspired time trial. As much as I love high rocks and love working with high rocks, we don't have the right to use their name in this guide yet. So use something that's similar, it's uh a challenge, it's kind of an obstacle course. And there you go. You can copy what I've got here. Okay. Then you've also got a dumbbell triplet and you're keeping it simple, you're keeping equipment needs simple. You don't need 50 different pieces of equipment to run this thing. It's fast, it's furious. You can have a lot of cheering from the sidelines because people will know what's going on. I love the long chip. I do. I, you know, filthy50 was my favorite CrossFit workout, but it's really hard for people on the sidelines to follow if you've got like 10 or 15 or 20 people doing it at once. Like, who's even winning? I don't know. And this is the biggest challenge that CrossFit ever had when their competition is they have to explain to the audience like who's actually winning. Try to avoid that. Try to make it really obvious who is where and how many rounds they've got, how many reps they've got. So, you know, let's talk about prizes. Now, look, you don't have to go crazy on prizes. You're charging people because that gives them the accountability to train. The the value of charging people is inherent in the fee for it, right? If I pay a hundred bucks, I'm gonna train really hard, I'm gonna get fitter and I'm gonna have a better competition. Okay, that's enough. You don't have to also hand out prizes or cash rewards or anything like that or free anything in your gym. What we do is just like a week of lunches from the winning team. Okay. You could do give everybody a t-shirt by all means. You want to give them like totems, artifacts, souvenirs, that kind of thing. But don't go overboard on the cash prizes. That's what that's gonna do is introduce like debate and oh, come on, man, the ref miscounted. Or what do you mean that wasn't a ref? It's gonna introduce the wrong energy into the gym. Now, you are a coach who is the biggest fan of your athletes. You want them to do well, and I get that. You want to give them an amazing time, I get that. You want to, you know, do this to keep them around and keep them engaged. I get that, but those things are not measurable. It's a guess. And I would bet that if I could measure it, if I could come into your gym and say, like, do the people who do competitions stick around longer? The answer is probably not. You have to be deliberate about making revenue and you have to be deliberate about keeping people engaged if you want those things to actually happen. You can't just put out a good product, you can't just put out a fun competition and hope those things happen. You have to be deliberate about it. So, first, remember that like your clients doing their best aligns with you making more money. The more coaching they get, the more they should pay for, but the more value they should also receive. That doesn't mean give them free coaching. That doesn't mean running free clinics, doing free personal training, staying after class. That devalues your coaching. You need to do the opposite. So you can run specialty courses in clinics, you can run accessory programs for strength to build up to it or skills or whatever. You can be running some one-on-one sessions, okay, or you can pair this with healthy habits and nutrition seminars too. Okay. So I've given you some examples here, like an example one, like a gymnastics example, a one-on-one. Okay. Um, you can also uh with registration fees, you can make recommendations. So, hey, look, I maybe you haven't used supplements before, but if you're ever going to use a protein supplement, maybe like now's the time. Okay. Um, you also want to be setting up t-shirts well in advance. You want to have like one design, you want to have a pre-order set up so that you know, okay, people need to register by February 15th to have the t-shirts in time for when we actually run the open. For example, okay, don't pick that date. Um, we work with Forever Fierce with this. Every year they do an amazing job. You can also do point incentivized activities. So this can actually pay off for your gym in more ways than just like them paying you money. Remember, if you want people to leave you a five-star review, you have to tell them to do that and how to do it. It won't just naturally happen. If you want people to bring a friend to the last workout, you have to tell them how to do that and why they should do that. It will not just happen. If you want um, you know, people to uh schedule a skill session, like a personal training session, you need to tell them to do that. Okay. Any behavior that you want from your clients, your staff, or yourself, you need to plan for and you need to tell them explicitly like, here is how you do it. All right. So feel free to add, you know, points into this, but don't water down your entire competition to the point where it's obvious that you're like just really seeking five-star reviews and referrals. Now, let's talk about that week four really briefly here. Okay. Um, the last week of the competition, whether it's week four or week five, you should encourage people to bring their friends and family. Now they're gonna be embarrassed about this. And so you should actually like write a post for them. Hey, I've been doing this competition. This week is the last week. I would love to have you there because it's just gonna be a party. Maybe you're gonna have a barbecue, maybe it's gonna be like a potlock or something like that. But basically just invite kids, parents, spouses, BFFs to come in and like watch and cheer. They're not involved in the workout, they're not, you know, doing a free trial workout or anything like that. It's your opportunity to meet them. You want them to sign a waiver if you're they're gonna be in your gym. And maybe you run a kid's heat or something like that. So the kids aren't just sitting around bored while mom and dad compete, right? Maybe you want to run a kid's like Ninja Warrior Challenge or something like that. Um, and that's a great way to get them in, get them involved, get them on your email list, and have a warm introduction so that when they are referred to you to do an NSI, you know, you can do you know who they are. You've got a relationship with them already. Right after the open end, you want to get people in for goal reviews. So you use this as a good excuse. Hey, uh, you know, Sally, so proud of what you did. Saw your posts on Instagram. You know, I know you got your first knees to elbows. Uh, we're so proud of you. Let's talk about what's next. This is a good time for us to talk about your progress so far and the future. Click this link here. Please book a goal review right now. And what that's going to do is put that client into a goal review, let you talk about their progress, let them talk about their goals. They might have goals for the first time ever. And then for you to say, well, here's the best path to your goals. Worst case, you get a testimonial from them and possibly a referral. Hey, by the way, I met Dave uh when he came to watch you, such a cool guy. Do you think if we invited him to come in and do a one-on-one session with you next week, he would come in? You know, it's it's just a great opportunity for referrals. Okay. Remember, these things don't happen by accident. You have to be deliberate about them. And that's why the intramural open is about so much more than just like running a competition. It's being deliberate about getting referrals. It's being deliberate about putting your members on podiums, it's being deliberate about getting stories to tell on your social media, all of these things. It's being deliberate about making more money, right? So now, if you've been running the intramural open for a decade or more, you can do a little refresh, right? Here's some ways that you can tweak the basics. These are good ideas that we've seen in the two-brand community that you can copy. I've got them all in the book. Um, another thing is like draft everyone, involve the kids. Uh, you know, you could even, if you want to, if you want to do like a bring a friend week on the very last workout, make it really simple. It's a shuttle run. Uh, you know, it's uh carry this weight for 5K, whatever. Be super creative and invite them to bring a friend in to help them with the load. You could do that.

unknown 29:05

All right.

Chris 29:06

Now, at the very start of this presentation, I said that the point here is to put your members on a podium. But if they're on a podium in an empty gym by themselves and nobody hears about it, who cares? They they'll feel good. But the reality here is that you have an opportunity to make your clients famous that they don't have anywhere else. Again, their boss is not saying to them, this is the best work you've ever done. That's never happening. They're probably not even hearing good job anywhere in their lives outside of your gym. This is the way that you expand that audience to say, I am so proud of Lisa. Put her on a podium, put her on Instagram, tell her story, get a video of her talking about her journey, put that on YouTube. Really, for me, the intramural open, it's awesome for the clients, it's awesome for the coaches. But the way that it grows my gym is it gives me an opportunity to tell stories and it gives me stories to tell. This is the part that most gym owners skip. But if you're not telling your members stories, you're not posting three times a day on social media, you're invisible. And people are going to listen to the stories of others. They're going to go sit at the campfire of that other gym who is out there telling stories because they're just more interesting. They are worth the potential client's attention. You need to be worth that attention. And the people that you want to brag about the most are right there in front of you, achieving amazing things. Like capture it. It is worth having an extra coach at every event who's just walking around with a camera, recording everything, taking pictures, interviewing people. How did that feel? It is so worth it. That's minimal investment, and you're getting great stories to tell. You can tell these stories for like the rest of the year. Okay. So I've got, you know, some tips here on capturing media. And then I've got some finally some survival tips. I said that the first year that we ran the CrossFit open, I felt like the members had a great experience. They loved it. I was exhausted. My coaches were exhausted. We hadn't had a day off in six weeks. I was broke. I hadn't seen my kids. And then I had to go right back into coaching again the following Monday. And every week I would get more and more tired and ask, why am I doing this? And so finally, we said, look, this is not worth doing for free anymore. There has to be a purpose to this, other than just the amazing purpose that the clients are getting. We have to make money. The coaches have to make money. I can't ask for volunteers anymore. The coaches were generous and they were willing to do it for free for the clients, but I just didn't want to impose on them anymore. So I wanted to be able to pay them. I wanted to enhance the member experience by giving them like a cool t-shirt and having a big banner with their name on it at the end. And I also wanted a week off in the middle. Like I did not want to be there every single time. I can remember, I don't even know where I was flying in from, but coming in on a plane and being away from my family for a week. I was probably working for CrossFit at the time, going straight to my gym and judging a competition instead of going home and seeing my kids. Like you need to have a good rotation here. And so I've got some good tips here on how to survive, especially if you're running like a five or a six-week workout. Final note here. And I don't need to share the guide here to tell you this. You deserve to be successful. I don't know, maybe nobody's ever told you this before, but your act of generosity was in giving up a stable career by buying and operating this gym. Your act of generosity does not extend to doing it for free. It does not extend to bartering yourself. It does not extend to asking your coaches to volunteer their weekends to give the members a better experience. Your act of generosity does not mean you have to be poor. In fact, if you are poor, your act of generosity in opening a gym will die on the vine. It will not last long enough to actually change people's lives. You have a responsibility to your clients, to your staff, to your family, and to yourself to be successful at this. It's not a matter of greed or nickel and diming people. It's being responsible enough to know when to charge because you're delivering extra value and how to deliver amazing value for the money that people are paying. I want to, I want to just, you know, bring that in, land the plane with that, because a lot of people will see this and say, yeah, we got to do that for our members. It sounds amazing. And they'll go out there and do it for free. And it will be good for the members in the short term, but bad for the gym in the long term. And that is not how you change people's lives. I need you to be around here for years and years and years. I want you to keep doing this kind of stuff every year so that you can keep changing lives out there. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Runner Profitable Gym. The Intramural Open is something we've been doing for over a decade. It's better every single year. We publish a new guide. This is the best guide we've ever done because I want it to be the best event you've ever done in your gym.