The Two-Brain Story: 10 Years of Solving Every Problem in the Gym Business

Feb. 13, 2026, is Two-Brain’s 10th anniversary—a full decade of solving every problem in the gym business.

In this special episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper tells the complete story of how Two-Brain Business became the biggest mentorship practice in the fitness industry.

The journey started long before 2016. In 2005, Chris opened his first gym, and by 2008, he was broke, running two struggling locations and looking for part-time jobs in the newspaper. He couldn’t find a single example of someone making a real living as a gym owner.

Then he found a mentor outside the fitness industry and started translating business lessons into gym-specific tactics. He published his first blog post on June 9, 2009, as a “love letter to future Chris”—sharing exactly what worked and what didn’t.

By 2012, gym owners were flying him to Fort Lauderdale to speak. He self-published his first book, “Two-Brain Business,” which went on to sell 26,000 copies, becoming the bestselling fitness business book of all time.

On Feb. 13, 2016, Chris officially launched Two-Brain Business with 52 gym owners who believed in the vision: make a difference, make a profit and make it home for dinner.

Today, Two-Brain works with thousands of gyms worldwide, publishes the industry’s largest data set every year and runs the biggest gym business summit in the world.

Tune in to hear the full origin story—and find out what’s ahead.

Join Coop at the 10th annual Two-Brain Summit, June 6-7, 2026, in Chicago; get your tickets with the link below.

Links

Two-Brain Summit Tickets

Gym Owners United

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1:05 - 2005-2015: Prehistory

1:12 - Opening a gym

6:28 - Hiring a mentor

18:09 - Publishing book No. 1

20:24 - Becoming a mentor

28:32 - 2016-2018: Early days

29:23 - The first Two-Brain Summit

35:57 - Building the “State of the Industry” report

39:43 - 2019-2021: Growth & lockdowns

43:39 - Certifying professional mentors

44:41 - 2022-2025: Additions and refinements

49:18 - 2026: 10th anniversary

49:33 - Leaving the CEO role

53:11 - The 10th annual Two-Brain Summit

Transcript

Chris 0:02

Over the last 10 years, we have collected the solutions for every problem in the gym business. If you want to book a call with my team, we can tell you how to solve your biggest problems. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym, and this is the 10-year anniversary of Two Brain. It's gone by in a flash. Today I'm going to recount the process, how we got here, and why we are the biggest and best mentorship practice in the entire fitness industry. February 13th, 2026 is Two Brain Day. It's the 10th anniversary of Two Brain Business. That means that 10 years ago, I launched TwoBrain Business.com publicly, and I had 52 gym owners as clients already that I was working with one-on-one. They believed in the vision. They wanted what I had for their gym. They wanted to make a plan, make a system, make a profit, and make it home for dinner with their family. But the story actually starts a lot earlier than 2016. And to understand TwoBrain and what it is and how it helps you, you need to know where it came from and why it exists. And that means you need to know the journey that led to this moment. Let's start with the prehistory, 2005 to 2008. In 2005, I opened my first gym. It was a personal training studio. It was above this greeting card store. It was somebody's apartment that we took over. It had this gray wallpaper on the walls and it had like this kind of shag carpet on the floor. And we didn't change any of that. Before I even opened my business, I had been reading business books because I understood that just being a good coach wasn't enough. But I had no idea how different being a good coach was from being a good business owner. I was always intrigued by business. I worked for some really successful entrepreneurs way back in 1998 when I came back to Canada from working in the States. And I was curious enough to absorb a lot of what these good entrepreneurs were telling me. But in 05, when I decided to actually open a gym, I didn't really understand business at all. I thought I knew more than I did. I was overconfident about my business skills. And it's a good thing that I was, because if I wasn't, I never would have opened a business. You and I, we need a little bit of that over-optimism, that overconfidence before we have the guts to actually open a business. And we all have to be overconfident like that. We all have to be optimistic to open a business in the first place, but very quickly we have to become realistic. We have to understand that whatever skills we thought we had for growing a business are not nearly sufficient for growth. It's not enough to be the best trainer in town and have a good training business. You have to be a good business owner. And by 2008, I had finally kind of figured this out. Unfortunately, it was coming almost too late. Most people figure this out really quickly. It doesn't take you three years to figure out that, uh-oh, owning a gym business takes more than just being a good coach. And so, you know, most people figure this out faster than I do. They open a business and they realize that nobody knows about them. And it took me three years because I'm egotistical, hard-headed, and stubborn. I thought I was just going to figure it all out by myself, or if I worked hard enough for long enough, it was just a matter of time before I was successful automatically, somehow. Neither of those things, of course, are true. Nobody just figures it out on their own. Nobody just grinds long enough that their business automatically becomes a success. And right around 2008, I had just opened my second gym. It had been open for a matter of months. I was making about$40,000,$45,000 a year from my first personal training studio. And I thought, I need$90,000 a year. The only way I'm going to do that is to open a second gym. Wrong. This gym had been open for a number of months and I was out of money. It was sucking up all of my income from the first gym. So I was completely broke. I thought that having that second location would double my income. In fact, what it did was it took all the income that I was making and took all of it to support itself. So I had no operating cash flow. I was losing money every month. I was missing my own paychecks and I was panicking because now I had two leases. I had staff who had to be paid. I was paying a rent and I was paying a triple net lease in one location because I hadn't read the lease and didn't understand what I was signing as well as I should have. And so I was ready to give up. I was looking for ways to get out of my leases without getting sued. I really had no hope. I was looking for part-time jobs in the newspaper just about every single day. And I thought fitness is not for me. I'm not going to make it. Even worse, I couldn't find any examples, not a single person locally or anywhere in the world who were being successful long term as a personal trainer or as a gym owner. There were a couple of personal trainers around me, but they were usually just supported by their spouse. It wasn't a full-time career for very many of them, let alone something that supported an entire family. So I had no models of success. I had no clear person to copy or emulate or follow. There were no books about the fitness business back then. There was this one guy, one of my gyms was a CrossFit gym, and CrossFit had kind of touted this guy as a business expert. But the reality was that once you started reading this guy's emails, you realized he was an obnoxious jerk. And I told myself, hey, even if this guy actually is successful, like he's claiming to be, if that's the way that I have to act to be successful in fitness, this is not the industry for me. And I really didn't think this guy was successful. It turns out I was right. He was faking it. And there's a lot of gurus in the fitness industry who are faking it. More on that later. So I couldn't find a simple a single example of success to copy. The internet was around. So I was looking, but I couldn't find a single example of somebody who had built an entire career on fitness coaching and retired at age 55 and seemed to be doing well and supporting a family. I couldn't even find people who worked for somebody like that. And I was writing for T-Nation at the time. Even the writers for T-Nation, the biggest names in fitness coaching at the time, they seemed to be barely scraping by. And they were the best trainers in the world, and they were still working 50 plus hour weeks and not really making a ton of money. So I was in a dark spot. I knew that what I was doing was not enough, but I couldn't find a single example of somebody who was doing it right, somebody who also had figured it out that I could talk to or even copy. In 2009, though, I locked into a mentorship program. This was early in the year. This mentor was not from the fitness business. And I said earlier there were no books about the fitness business. There were no legit mentors in the fitness business. But what I found was a mentor, uh, mostly by luck, I lucked into a local mentorship program with somebody who is not in the fitness industry, but he was huge in the manufacturing sector. This guy appears in like different business classic books. And this was really important to find this mentor person. He taught me a lot of stuff about fitness. He gave me books to read. I was already consuming like one business book a week. But after I realized that there's nobody in the fitness industry who can really show me how to implement these tools, that's when I started looking outside. And so the books that I was reading were by people like Seth Godin. And I was reading, you know, Michael Gerber's E-Myth, that kind of stuff, good to great, all the classics. I was reading a lot of business books back then. They're full of great ideas. Linda Kaplan Thaler, amazing on marketing, but there was no tactical implementation, no do this right now. And I had a lot of theoretical knowledge. You're probably in the same boat right now. You're listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos like this one, you're reading books, and you've got all this theory in your brain. But I had a gym and I was learning from the mistakes that I was making in that gym, but nobody was saying, here's exactly what you do, or here's how you fix this problem. Nobody was translating the lessons in the books into tactical advice. And so when I found my first mentor, the first thing I did was said, okay, Chris, you're paying for this. You really can't afford it. You need to translate everything he's telling you into your gym so you can take those lessons and explain them to yourself and actually apply them. It's not enough just to know the answer. You have to apply the answer over and over and over. And this is a learning technique. I was raised by teachers. I learned in college that the best way to actually learn something is to translate it into your own words so that you actually understand it or to pretend to teach it back to yourself. And I figured the best way to do that was to take the knowledge from this mentor, Dennis, and all the business books that I was reading and actually teach it to myself while applying it to my gym. So the first book this mentor had me read was called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. You've probably read it. It's a great book. The book is about breaking down all the things that you do through the course of your day into different roles, like all the different hats that you wear in your business. And then you write a checklist for each role. Now it saves you a ton of time and a ton of mental energy because you wind up doing things the same way all the time. And it improves your business by making you consistent instead of just making it up every single day from scratch. And it may also make it easy to delegate roles and train other people to do the right things at the right time in the right way in your business. So I read the emyth and then I said, okay, how do I translate this into my gym? And I actually did the work. I sat down and I wrote down the 12 different roles in the gym business. And then I wrote down exactly how you did the cleaning and the coaching of a group and the delivery of a personal training session and how to sell a gym membership and everything else. I wrote it down. Then, working with my mentor, Dennis, I applied these lessons. So I turned this into a staff handbook and then I walked all my staff through it. Here's exactly how you run a class. Here's how to open the gym, here's how to close the gym, here's how to sell a membership, here's how to enter a new member, here's how to give them the swipey card. I wrote it all down. So now if somebody walked into the gym and I wasn't there, I wasn't scared of losing a sale. If I wasn't there to coach the class, I knew that the clients would get a good experience. I didn't have to clean the bathroom myself to know that the bathroom would be clean. And then I took it a step further with my mentor and actually hired a cleaner. I had the cleaning checklist done. It was easy to hire them. I didn't have to worry about them or look over their shoulder or wonder every single morning if they'd done a good enough job. They just followed the checklist and it was done. And what that did was it bought me back some headspace, it bought me back some time so that I could work on marketing and started to grow my gym. And I took it even further. On my blog, where I was translating these lessons for myself, I would share it. Here's my checklist. And nobody was really reading the blog at that time, but I was publishing the stuff every day as a love letter to myself in the future. You know, this is something that I learned probably just through doing. I was um making up my gym business one day at a time, every single day. Every single day I was starting from scratch, just taking it as it came, not taking any steps to build a foundation for the future, not actively growing my gym, not even taking control, just kind of surviving. Every single gym at the day at the gym was different. And I thought that's how business should be run. You open the door and then you just fight fires and react all day. And I thought, okay, if I want to have a consistent business, if I want to have this foundational business that runs without me, that's just as good when I'm not there as it is when I am there, that might actually pay me more than just for the personal training sessions that I do there. I'm gonna have to start building a foundation of a real business. It's up to me to take charge and get this stuff out of my head and coach and manage my staff on it. I'm gonna have to start doing things with the future in mind instead of just taking things as they came, day by day, trying to tread water, trying to survive. And so that was the start of everything. That was the turning point for me. I started writing love letters to myself, to future Chris, but I did make that blog public for ultimate accountability. Now I had to give the blog a name, and so I called it Don't Buy Ads because the first session I ever had with my mentor Dennis, I thought, okay, marketing's gonna fix my problem, right? I just need more leads. And I still hear this from gym owners 15, 16 years later. I thought, I just need more bodies in the door, and that's gonna solve everything. And what Dennis said to me was, Chris, marketing is not your problem. But if you start doing more marketing now, it's going to become your problem. What he meant was I would spend money on marketing right now. Okay. And best case, it actually works, which was kind of a long shot, and you get the right people in, which was another long shot. But the gym wasn't very good right then. So the people are gonna come in, they're the right people, they can afford it, they're gonna have an inconsistent experience. The bathrooms are not gonna be clean, the coaching is not gonna be good unless it's done by me. New staff won't know how to sign them up. The great person comes in the door. How do I sign up? I don't know, and they go join somewhere else, right? He said, You're just gonna make the problem worse if you bring the right people into the gym right now because they're all gonna leave and they're not gonna come back. They're not gonna give you a second try. So you have to fix all these other things first. And I really took that to heart. So I called my first blog, Don't Buy Ads, and I started publishing there as a reminder to myself that I wasn't ready to pour more water into this leaky bucket that I had and that I was holding. I started publishing there uh more and more often. It went from once a week to three times a week to every single day as I started learning faster and faster, and things started to work and I started to apply them better. I got better as a gym owner because I got better at doing the reps and the reps that I made were better too, just like exercise. I saw what worked faster and what didn't. I was diligent. I tried things for three months at a time before deciding whether to keep them. I was consistent. When something worked, I kept doing it. And on June 9th, 2009, I published that first blog post to help other gym owners on don'tbuyads.com. By that point, I'd already been working with my mentor one-on-one for several months and it was starting to work. My gym was turning around. People started reading the blog just because it was public. There really weren't many sources of information for gym owners back then. And a lot of the early readers were extremely smart gym owners who understood that I was doing science here. They got the process. They knew that I was going to try things, that I was going to be rigorous in my experiments, that I would try them out for three months, that I would give them a good shot, and then I would post about whether they worked. And if they worked, I would say, here's exactly how I did it. Like very explicitly, here's the checklist, here's the playbook, and just have like a download link there. And if I tried something and it didn't work, then I would say this didn't work. And I would be completely honest because my only customer for that blog was me. It was future Chris. And I was trying to send a present to myself in the future, giving future Chris a gift. And this is kind of a motto that I still live by every day. I always try to send a present to the future to future Chris. In 2012, I got a phone call from somebody who was reading the blog. Now I didn't couldn't see who it was, but the blog was getting a little bit of hype by that point. Keep in mind it was three and a half years old. CrossFitHQ had posted links to the blog several times. I was a CrossFit affiliate at the time, a fairly new one, and they were happy to share perspective from other CrossFit affiliates, but they didn't want to elevate somebody to that kind of guru status. After the first experience they'd had with this original guru guy, I understood it, right? But they were happy to share that perspective on the CrossFit main site or the CrossFit affiliate blog. And I wasn't saying explicitly, this is right and that's wrong, you should do this, you shouldn't do that at that point, because I only had a data set of one person, my gym. It was just me, and I was just sharing my own experience, and they like that a lot. People were finding the blog through CrossFit main site, obviously, also through Google. And so these gym owners asked me to come down to Fort Lauderdale and give a talk in February 2012. I was really nervous about it, but I said, uh, I'm gonna go because this might help some other people. There was no money in it for me. It was gonna cost me money to go. I really didn't want to take, you know, three or four days away from my gym. I really didn't want to pay out of pocket to go. They covered my flights or something and maybe my hotels, but you know, this is one lesson that I've learned early on. I have a lot of internal barriers to success. I was scared to charge what I was worth at my gym. I wanted to give everybody a discount because I thought that's how you help people by giving them money. And that's not true. And I had to work my way through a lot of that. And I worked my way through that by blogging about it and by practicing at it. And so this is one of those places where I said, Chris, your barriers to doing this seminar in Fort Lauderdale are internal. And do you actually care about helping other gym owners or not? And I cared so much about these other gym owners in preventing them from going through the traumatic experience that I'd been through that I was willing to overcome the expense and the fear of getting on stage in front of them. And so the lesson here is that the only thing stronger than fear is love. I'm gonna be talking a lot more about this in 2026, overcoming your internal barriers to charge what you're worth and say the things to clients and staff that you need to say. So the only thing that's stronger than that fear that's stopping you from doing it is love. And you have to constantly ask yourself, do I care enough about this other human to overcome my own internal BS? In this case, back in 2020, 12, I knew I loved gym owners even then, and I wanted to help them to do whatever it took. So I booked the flight, the flight to Fort Lauderdale. My gym was doing better. I could afford the flight. They were gonna reimburse me, but I really couldn't afford to put out a few thousand dollars to ship tons and tons of books or any other materials or stay any extra days. So I self-published 30 copies of my best blog post. I called it two-brain business. This was the original book right here. Okay, look at the cover. It's hilarious. I called it two-brain business because a big part of our gym at that time was cognitive training and we were even doing brain rehab. Insurance companies were actually paying us to do this. And the more that I learned about the brain, the more I learned about how there were really two sides to a business. One, the left hemisphere of your brain, is the systems and processes that run the business consistently well with excellence. And the other side of the brain, the right side, is the creative side, the marketing and sales that get people to actually show up and stick around. These are the two sides of the business, and I broke them out separately in the book. Now I had to make a cover for the book, so that means I had to use Microsoft Paint in my mouse and like hand draw this skull, the gears inside his brain, and it the back is even worse. Um, if you've got a copy of this book, congratulations, please let me know. I went down and did that seminar in Fort Lauderdale. I was really intimidated by the other speaker. One was Ben Bergeron, who had just won the CrossFit Games, and the other was Clay, who was the founder of the Iron Tribe franchise. He had about a dozen franchise locations already. He was a big deal. And these guys were really dialed. They were professional speakers. They'd been coached in speaking. They had great presentations, they brought amazing tools with them. I just kind of showed up and handed out copies of this book that I couldn't figure out how to print, and so I used a self-publication house and shipped the copies directly to the gym. Nobody had ever heard of me. Nobody was really interested. They put me on in the middle because, you know, they really wanted Ben to kick it off and for Clay to really close things down with quality information. All of us spoke for free. Most of the copies of this book, the original, got left behind. I didn't even take a copy with me when I left there. And luckily, years later, a friend of mine came to visit from South Carolina, and he had snagged a copy of the book at that seminar and given it back to me. And it's huge right now. That's why I have a copy today. It's the only reason. But I published that book on a service called Lulu. They got acquired by Amazon. And before I knew it, the book was available on Amazon and it sold 26,000 copies and became the best-selling fitness business book of all time. I think it still holds the record. But around that same time, I started helping gym owners one-on-one. I was doing about 60 free calls every month and about 40 paid mentorship calls. Um, and this stuff happened, you know, 2011, 2012. In 2012, um, I had just come back from doing the Fort Lauderdale seminar and I got a phone call from this website company called 321 Go Project. The website company was owned by this guy named Clay. He was Chris Spieler's brother-in-law, and he was getting a lot of questions from gym owners about how to make more money. Now, of course, Clay was selling them websites, but the reality was, and we both saw it, and even the gym owners saw it, they had bigger problems than just a crappy website. Some of them were struggling to pay for his websites, and most of them weren't even paying themselves. Clay was making good websites, but he was making them all custom and he wasn't tracking any data about which ones worked the best at that time. So he wasn't sure what was actually working. They were all just beautiful artistic sites that were working better than anything else gym owners were doing. You know, I had a type pad website, a free website back then. Even doing something back then on WordPress was kind of novel. And the problem was that these people needed help way beyond just having a website. So the website did help them, absolutely. But Clay called me up and he said, Would you do some calls with them? And so I did about five or six free calls, and people were saying, How can I work more with you? So Clay and I set up this blended mentorship practice and we split the proceeds. I think it was 50 50, but I could be wrong about that. It was very inexpensive for what we. We're doing. We would do about 10 calls with people and we would charge per call about 100 bucks. And the problem was that everybody thought that they just needed more leads, but their problems were far, far, far deeper. And so over time, as I was doing more and more of these, what I started to see was that there were 10 common problems that every gym had. That meant by 2013, I was getting a lot of reps working one-on-one with a lot of different gym owners, especially in the States. And I was doing seminars three to four times a year. I was still a CrossFit affiliate. CrossFit Inc. uh. actually sent people to record some of these seminars and they published my material in the CrossFit Journal. For the next few years, I had the only business-related publication in CrossFit Media because I was the only one tracking any data about what was actually working instead of just saying, well, this worked for me, or here's a good idea I just read about in a book, but haven't actually applied. And that exposure changed a lot for me. Gym owners from around the world started reaching out. And the problems that they had were universal. They had cash flow problems, client retention problems, time management problems, managing and hiring people. But every gym owner thought that they were alone in facing them. And they thought that they were this special snowflake where their problems were absolutely unique to them. But the reality is that each of their problems fell into 10 different buckets. And we had a lot of these problems because we are fitness coaches. We didn't know anything about opening a business when we opened a business. So in 2014, I said, okay, I've been doing this now with over 100 gyms, one-on-one mentorship. I know everything about those gyms. I know what the common struggles are. And I also know that those struggles still fall into kind of two meta buckets. There's the marketing and sales sweep, and then there's the systems and operations side. Still the two brains. Of course, the problems get more specific once you get into the buckets, but I knew that there are still two brains to a business. And I started writing new books on each of these topics at the same time. I would go back and forth between the two topics, and I would wake up at 4 a.m. literally every day with an idea already in my head to write about and a story to tell, something that I had done at my gym that I could share, or something that one of my mentorship clients had done that I could share with other people and tell them exactly what to do. So in the original book, Two Brain Business, I explained basically what you should do. In these two books, the operations and system side of how to run a gym and the marketing and sales side, I could get really explicit with real instructions, real samples, and real examples step by step of how I did it. So I was kind of ping-ponging back and forth every morning, one after another. Each of these books is about 70,000 words, and I wrote them both within four months. They just poured out. All I was doing was saying, you know, here's the principle, here's how I did it, here's how to put it into action step by step. Two-Brain Business 2.0 was never a popular book because it was a deeper dive into systems and processes, right? Boring. This is really what makes your gym profitable. But Help First was a very popular book, and people loved it because it was really about the mindset of marketing. It was really about how marketing is the first act of coaching and sales is also just coaching, and retention is just also coaching. You're coaching people to make a decision to change their life, not just coaching them to push their knees out at the bottom of the squat. And help first really got that across to people. And it also shared dozens of examples of here's exactly how I formed a partnership with this bridal shop. Here's exactly how I started getting paid with insurance funds to work with kids who had brain trauma. You know, here's exactly how I had my clients going out and recruiting other clients for me. And that mindset really stuck with a lot of people. It felt more natural to them than what they had learned about marketing from podcasts and YouTube and books. It helped them get over their own internal barriers to marketing and sales. And they felt they had felt like they were asking for money, like they were this used car salesman, like they were slimy, that they were promising things that they weren't sure they could deliver, that they were tricking people into paying them. And so the help first book really helped them see, oh, it's just coaching. And part of coaching is actually encouraging people to show up. And part of coaching is encouraging people to commit, to sign up to the gym. And so I shared dozens, as I said, of tactical, practical examples, partnerships that I had made, you know, running a week-long event to get my clients to actually start teaching their friends and training their friends to sign up, running courses to help my clients upgrade their knowledge, doing seminars with partners. You know, there's dozens of examples in sell less, profit more because I wanted people to feel less like they were selling, but still make more of a profit. However, both books were equally important and they they played off each other. They were really the yin and the yang of business. And after those books were published, I kept doing seminars in person through that entire time. In 2015, uh, we had so many people signing up for one-on-one mentorship, and I could only work with about 50 at a time because I wanted to do a great job and not be on like seven hours of calls every day. So I thought, okay, you know, I I've pretty much got the systems dialed, I've got the ops dialed, I've got the lessons dialed, I can tell people do exactly this. You know, there's two sides to the business. I've gone deep on the marketing side and I've gone deep on the systems and ops side. Now I'm done. I had I had three books to my name. Amazing. And I kind of thought that was crazy from where I had started out as a failing gym owner who had turned things around for themselves. And so in 2015, I launched a business course on 321goproject.com. And, you know, I filmed everything in my basement. If you were around back then, thank you for watching 30 minutes of a talking head standing in front of this brown wall, you know, filmed over the Christmas holidays, over like two weeks. Um that course was good because it taught the stuff from my book step by step and it gave people resources to use, but I was tracking results. Of course, this is what I do. And it wasn't giving the results that I wanted gym owners to get. And so we pivoted back to one-on-one mentorship. Now, this caused a lot of friction at the website company where I was still working, enough friction that I decided to go out on my own. And the lesson was critical. Gym owners didn't just need more information. They didn't need a flashy course because it was cool to build. They needed somebody to help them apply the right information to their specific situation. And that insight became the foundation of two brain business, the mentorship practice that is today. On February 13th, 2016, I launched two brainbusiness.com. I sold one-on-one mentorship and I did everything myself. I started with about 52 gyms who believed in that vision. They were working on the same mission that I was. They were working on, you know, making a difference in their clients' lives, making a profit and making it home in time for dinner. That's really the core of what we do. And it's all the gym owners want. You know, gym owners are not getting into the gym business to become billionaires. It's not going to happen. It's the service industry. It's one of the hardest services on the planet. But they will be happy as long as they can feel like they're making a difference, making a profit so that they can stay in business, and making it home in time for dinner so they're not sacrificing their family for their passion. Now, that year, 2016, I was working with Dan Martell uh in a small group setting. And I understood the power of bringing people together in person and how that paired with one-on-one mentorship to get just the best results in the world. And that's when I started the Two Brain Summit. The summit in 2016 wasn't about big name speakers or motivation. It was about gym owners solving problems together, learning from people who had actually done it. And so I spoke on stage, a couple of others did. Some of my coaches ran sessions for coaches in the gym down the hall. And that was the first summit. You know, we had maybe about 50 people there. We gave out a cool CEO t-shirt. We had some amazing coffee. We went out for ribs at night. And, you know, but we did it together. And that really fueled a lot of connection between people. And they started helping themselves and helping each other, even when I wasn't in the room. By 2017, though, I couldn't do all the mentorship by myself anymore. So I started training other mentors. The first two were Jason Williams and Danny Brown. We moved the summit to Niles, Illinois at CrossFit Alumen because Brian Alexander wanted to host it. Um, Dave Tate came and spoke. I met John Franklin there in person for the first time. He told me about his saga with gyms, and we'll cover that on a future podcast. I think you're gonna love it. Also, in that same year, I spoke at CrossFit HQ at a free seminar for about 40 local gym owners. And that was surreal, uh, standing in the place where CrossFit uh was really run, like the beating heart of CrossFit, talking about business. But all this meant that I had to make TwoBrain a system so that other people could mentor on that system. And that meant that I had to really dial it in and focus it on something that was predictable, could get predictable outcomes and results for everybody, and could be taught by people who weren't me. It also meant that it was critically important that we started teaching things from a broader data set instead of just here's what I did, here's what the mentors did at their gym. Because what we started to see in 2018 was that different people were coming into the program at different levels. They had different needs. And while everybody should do the core things, the marketing, the systems, some people needed to do one thing right now and push the other thing to later. And so they needed different advice depending on where they were in their business, right? Affinity marketing was working amazing for people who already had 100 clients and they had good relationships and they were providing a great service. But what about gym owners who didn't have 100 clients or who didn't have good systems or they were just starting out? And so I started to think about the different phases of who needed to hear what and when. And all the advice that was out there on the internet was starting to be more available for free. We had been publishing for free every single day for years by that point, but none of that information was sorted. Nobody was saying, do this right now based on where you are. And nobody could even get close to that. And so I wrote Founder, Farmer, Tinker Thief in 2018 just to describe the entrepreneur's journey and give people a sense of here's the tool that I need at this stage. Here's how to tell when I'm ready to hire, and here's how to do it, and here's how to tell when I'm ready for another location, here's how to buy one. And I wanted to create that filter for people to help them decide what they should act on right now. The mentor training program was also formalized and launched with five more mentors in 2018. We kept the summit at CrossFit Alumen with two stages and a full sweaty house of gym owners, still eating good barbecue, though. That was key. We had expanded dramatically by that point. We were already working with about 300 gym owners at once. We already had a staff of about a dozen mentors because we had formalized our mentor training program. And we were gathering data from every single one of those gyms. So that meant we had this little data set of about 300 gyms, and we were able to say, like, okay, well, what worked at Chris's gym, Chris's gym was unique to that gym. It's not worked anywhere else. Let's set it aside. But what worked at this gym is working for everybody. And so we can teach that. That data set gave us a broader perspective, but it also allowed us to be more accurate than we had ever been. We expanded the mentor team to include European mentors. And if you remember back to 2018, if you were in the industry then, you might remember that gym launch was kind of peaking at that point. And so we added the digital marketing program to TwoBrain. You know, John Franklin was kind of the champion of that. Uh, he had taken uh a whole bunch of different courses on digital marketing. He ran three gyms in kind of the New York, New Jersey area at the time. He had really dialed it in the same way Hermozzi had done. And he said, I'm gonna build a course for TwoBrain on digital marketing. That course worked so well for so many gyms that we eventually just rolled it into our core curriculum and it's still there today. This is also when CrossFit HQ invited us to come out and teach a seminar. So I flew people from across the world, some of the mentors on the team, to go to CrossFit HQ on our dime, by the way. We did it for free. Uh they invited 30 or 40 local gym owners. It cost us tens of thousands of dollars to actually do this. We ran a two-day seminar and we taught everything. We taught everything from the books from the course. The pitch to us was from CrossFit HQ at the time: this is a test. We want to run a CrossFit level one for business for affiliates, and we want you to deliver it. This is the trial. We'll give you feedback, we'll tweak it, we'll have input, but then we're gonna have this program. And so we did it, and of course, we heard nothing. And this was just part of my ongoing challenge with CrossFit for a decade. It started way before that seminar. It lasted through ownership changes, you know, up until recently. And unfortunately, at some point, I just had to grasp the point that I would always work for CrossFit affiliates, but I would never work for CrossFit HQ. And as soon as I realized that, it became fine. So our reach was expanding in 2018. The CrossFit Journal was still publishing a lot of our business advice. I had been writing for CrossFit for several years. I ended my tenure with them in 2018 when the media team cutbacks began. I hired the head of the CrossFit Journal, Mike Workington, to come and work for TwoBrain when he was downsized. And looking at CrossFit, I said, okay, if I build a business on this model, publishing lots of content every day for free, which I was good at and had already been doing for almost a decade at that point, and sell coaching, so share knowledge for free, sell the coaching, that can be a great business. That's what CrossFit did, that's what I've done, that's what I've been doing up to this day. And that's still the model that we practice at Two Brain. I learned it from Greg Glassman. So 2018, all these changes are happening at HQ. They had a COO at the time, they had another CEO. It wasn't Greg, his name was Jeff Kane. And I was down in Santa Cruz, we were having breakfast in Scotts Valley, and one of them, I think the COO, Bruce, says, you know, what's the number one thing that we can do to help affiliates without explicitly saying you have to follow this playbook? Because they didn't want to be a franchise, right? They didn't want to take on that risk or that burden. And so I said, well, you know, the best thing that you can do for affiliates is just collect data from all of them and publish it so that every single affiliate owner knows. Here's the average price of CrossFit in this location compared to what we're charging. And here's the demographics in my location. There were a lot of myths out there at that time, like, oh, I live in the poorest area of southern Atlanta, my rates have to be 70 bucks. I can remember an owner, an affiliate in Atlanta. I went to visit them, him saying, like, you can't charge more than 70 bucks for CrossFit in Atlanta. I mean, this was 2018, right? He should have been charging three times that much, especially because he was the first one there. So there was really basic myths, lack of knowledge that they could, CrossFitHQ could provide some answer to just by collecting basic information from the payment and billing software. And so I proposed this to the CrossFit HQ staff, and and Bruce said, I'll never forget this, he said, Chris, that's a great idea, but we're never gonna do it. And I was really depressed at that time because I thought, well, if CrossFit's not gonna do this, then how are they gonna help affiliates? They have to start from truth. They have to publish knowledge. And then within 24 hours, I realized, look, CrossFit has the best reach to do this. It's probably their responsibility to do this for the affiliates. And they're the only ones that can get data from all the affiliates. But I have the second best reach, and that means that I have the second largest responsibility. We were working with about 300 CrossFit affiliates at that time. We had about 7,000 gym owners reading our daily emails. Now that number's 40,000, by the way. And I said, okay, I'll do it. It's not going to get every gym, but it's going to be better than anything else that's out there. And if we really want to be giving people real advice on running their gyms, we have to have data. We have to be able to say, yes, this is the truth, or that's not the truth. There were a couple of other gym business people in the space at that time, and they were just saying, here's how I ran my gym. You have to do it exactly like that. I knew that that went counter to the entrepreneurial ethos. We didn't want to do that, but we did need the information to make smart decisions. And so we started our state of the industry publication in 2018 with that in mind. It was a survey, it was optional. We got data from about 700 gyms and it was pretty good. It wasn't representative of the entire industry, but it was way better than anything else that was out there. And a lot of people loved it and they started making decisions based on that. And so we decided to keep doing that. And, you know, to this date now, we publish the biggest set of data in the industry. Other people use this, they refer to it. It's amazing. It costs us like a quarter of a million every year to put this together. We have amazing partners in Kilo and Whatify who help us get the raw data. And then we interpret it and we tell you like, here's exactly what to do. And what we learn from this is what we publish for you every single day, every single week, every month in gymownersunited.com and on our website and on this podcast, it's based in fact, it's rooted in truth, so that you know when I tell you something is working, I have the data to back that up. It's not just an idea that just came to me. It's not something I heard on a podcast that's unproven. It's not something that some other dude is just saying to sell their business course. Starting around 2019, after that first year of state of the industry, we started working with different payment processors to get way more data for the state of the industry report. We also expanded the two brain team again and we changed our mentor training program to include more coaching. What we were realizing is that instead of you working one-on-one with a mentor and hearing about what they did at their gym, we were far better off to have a solid centralized two-brain program and have people coach you on how to implement that to get the best results faster. We built that digital marketing program right into our incubator program for no additional charge. We moved the summit to Rosemont, Illinois, a bigger venue because we needed the space. And we had an amazing summit, right? 500 people came. The vendors were great. A lot of the same vendors that came in 2016 are still coming 10 years later, like Forever Fierce. We attracted some big new names like Rogue to help out, and people started bringing their staff. They wanted to give their staff an amazing experience too. We had this amazing momentum in our summit by the end of 2019. And then in 2020, lockdown started. I published the Gym Owners Handbook in 2020, and then, of course, everything changed in the industry. When worldwide lockdown started, we launched GymOwnersUnited.com, a free group, and we started publishing daily briefs to keep gym owners informed and open. Those were crazy times. We were writing those briefs at 4 a.m., seven days a week, publishing them. Here's what's happening, here's what you can do. We moved the Two Brain Summit to virtual. It wasn't my choice, but that's just what happened back then. We had Seth Godin, we had Chris Voss, we had Risha Grant, uh Jen Brocksterman, Cameron Harold all speaking, and they all had to shift to delivering online. There was a lot of fear out there, uncertainty, and the community came together anyway. And I started asking myself, even from 2016, what do gym owners need to learn right now? Not who's popular in the gym industry, but who is the expert in this thing that's going to help gym owners, whether they're in the fitness industry or not. And more and more we were getting people like Chris Voss, like Seth Godin, you know, uh Jocko Willing to come in and tell gym owners what they needed at that moment instead of what was popular in the fitness industry. 2020 was a pivoting point. I did not like delivering the summit online, but we did it and people loved it. And it actually allowed us to bring in more experts who didn't want to travel. Now, during that time, if you work with high-level speakers like Jocko and Lisa Nichols and Tod Herman and Seth Godin, you'll know that speaking fees tripled. People stopped wanting to travel. And so they were either willing to do like online seminars, or, you know, you were renting a private JAT and paying about$90,000 to$120,000 for an hour of speaking from these people. And so I had to make a choice. There were still a lot of lockdowns happening in 2021. And I could afford to get Jocko Willink, Lisa Nichols, and Todd Herman to speak if we kept it virtual. And so we did that. And it was a turning point in how I thought about the summit. I realized that we needed to bring gym owners together with the people that they needed to hear, not just the popular people in the fitness industry. But it was equally important to have gym owners meet each other so that we didn't feel like we were alone on an island out there. You know, Jocko came to the summit and he talked about discipline and extreme ownership. And Lisa gave us a lot of belief and a lot of energy, and Todd gave us the tools to become the people that our businesses needed us to be. But we also needed that in-person connection. And so we said 2022, no matter what happens, we're going back to Chicago. We had signed this long-term commitment with this hotel. And so we had to go there. Whether they were open or not, we were going to run the summit again. In that same time period, while we were locked down, you know, many gym owners worldwide, 2021, the Two Brain Mentor Program at Two Brain started to become renowned worldwide as the standard for licensing professional mentors. Um, I I met Lisa Nichols at an event called the Archangel Summit. I decided I had to bring her in, but also So we knew that there were a lot of people springing up who were just kind of giving advice out of desperation. Their own gyms had failed. They were starting to sell, you know, advice online just to make a dollar to make ends meet. And we realized that we had to professionalize our mentor team even more. And so we created the TwoBrain Mentor Certification. Our mentors got uh went through the course again, they took certification exams. It became very hard to become a mentor for Two Brain. Uh, people started doing tryouts, they started applying and not making it until the second or third application. Some people didn't make it at all. And other business coaches in different niches started reaching out to talk about how we were training our mentors on the two brain system so that they became great coaches and far more than just people giving advice on how they had done it in their gym. Also, following the success of Founder Farmer Tinker Thief, I realized that we needed a different course, a different book for people in those different phases. And so I published Start a Gym in 2022 and I launched startedgym.com along with the new Start a Gym program at Two Brain Business. Now this was specifically for gym owners in the founder phase. People could go to startedgym.com and get a ton of free resources for free that I would gladly have paid an arm and a leg for when I started in 2005 because I wanted people to launch successfully and not make the mistakes that would kill them three years later. We had learned that gym owners at different stages needed different things. A gym owner in their first year or about to open needs different guidance than one who's been operating profitably for five years. And so, you know, I wrote different books for different phases. Started gym was for people who were just starting out. And eventually, Millionaire Gym Owner was for people in that tinker phase who were asking, what's next? I'm making a good income. How do I turn that into an investment? How do I turn it into impact? How do I create a legacy? How do I make sure this is going to stay profitable? What if I want to expand? What if I don't? You know, what if I want to get into other industries? That's what Millionaire Gym Owner was all about. In 2023, I published a book called Simple Six, which is a distillation of our methods. I said that we had to codify our mentor training program. That meant that we had to train our mentors, starting with the fundamentals. And the fundamentals were the six metrics that you need to run a gym and how to optimize, how to improve those metrics. When I published the Simple Six, I took a lot of flack internally. My staff was like, Chris, this is the secret sauce. This is the program. You're teaching people to do the thing that the mentors will do with them. But it was the same as I'd always done, given the information for free and sold coaching on implementation. I can tell people exactly how we do it. I can give you the secret recipe, but we still need coaches. The same reason your clients come to you for coaching, and the same reason you hire a business coach, and the reason that I still hire a business coach is because implementation is about way more than just having the knowledge. And so I published The Simple Six. This was not my most popular book. It might be my least popular book, but it's the most potent. People who read this book, take action on it, they still send me letters to this day. Like, I can't believe you published this book for 20 bucks or whatever. The Simple Six was a distillation of the only six metrics that gym owners really need to track. It's also the book that people in other industries follow to great success. So if you want to give a book to a buddy who owns a coffee shop, like this is the one to give them Simple Six. Everything else I do is written specifically for the gym owners. And, you know, this these books come from years of watching gym owners get overwhelmed by data. And gym owners would track like 30 different metrics for one month, and they would not know if their business was healthy. They'd be surprised by their tax bill at the end of the year. They never even knew how much money they were making. And the Simple Six cut through all of that noise. In 2024, this is when I published Millionaire Gym Owner because I wanted to talk to people who were in the tinker phase, uh, people who had already built a fairly successful gym and now they're ready to build wealth. And also in 2024, toward the end of the year, I published a book called The Golden Hour, and we launched the Golden Hour Challenge because what we found out was that the people who were in this book or in this phase, they didn't have different knowledge from people who were struggling and trying to work through farmer phase. What they had was different habits. And so I published the Golden Hour and I issued the Golden Hour Challenge. It was really about gym owners reclaiming their time and investing that time to work on what actually matters to grow their business. Also that year, the summit sold out for the first time at a thousand seats. And that was a milestone, not because it was a number, but because it was, it meant that we had built something that gym owners truly valued. They came back year after year. There were people who had sold their gym and they still wanted to come to Summit to connect with everybody and learn from the experts that we were bringing in. In 2025, we said it's time to return to our fundamentals. So I published Help Best, which was a return to the fundamentals of coaching clients. Help Best is a follow-up to Help First, and it's a coaching book. And I did that with collaboration from five of the mentors on our team. The summit sold out again in 2025. We had really found our rhythm there. And a lot of the same vendors had been there for almost a decade now. It was amazing. And so we decided in 2026 that we were going to uh upgrade again, that we were going to evolve Tubrain. And so this year I moved out of the CEO role of Tubrain Business, and I'm back to doing what I like best, which is creating content to help gym owners. We're moving the summit to an upgraded venue. It's nearby Rosemont. I love Rosemont. It's so great if you want to bring your staff and just give them an amazing weekend. Um, but we're at the Hyatt now across the street. It's bigger, it's brighter, it's beautiful. Mike McAllowitz is our headliner this year. I'll be giving a keynote. We've got some amazing people who have already signed up to teach at Summit, to lead at Summit. Summit's never been about listening to the speaker, it's always been about working with the speaker to take action. We're stepping out of the CEO role for me has meant fewer meetings for sure, less time with my hands in the ops of the business, and more time creating content for you. The summit is something that started in 2016. It's an important part of the two-brain program. It's not, you know, the the summation of the two-brain program or anything like that. It's a lot of new information that people are getting before anybody else. They're working with high-level speakers, but most importantly, they're hearing from the people they need to hear from, not just like the most popular people in the fitness business. You know, Rick Mayo is going to be speaking, he's amazing, he's done great things in the fitness business. Dane McCarthy's speaking, he's done great things in the fitness business. Uh Greg Glassman has said he'll be there. He's done great things in the fitness business. I'm going to try and deliver at that standard. We've got mentors who go through this tryout period and they go through speaking coaching for months before the summit so that we know that we're providing you with a good, the best summit in the fitness business. Um, but the theme still hasn't changed. It's like, what do gym owners need right now and how can we provide that? One of the things that you need is connection. That's your right brain. The other is information and time to act on it, and that's your left brain. This has always been the point of the summit. We started small in 2016. It was just a room full of gym owners who wanted to get better together. 2017, we moved to CrossFit Alumen in Niles, Illinois. We had two stages. In 2019, we moved to the Rosemont to accommodate more people. 2020, 2021, we went virtual, but brought in the best speakers in the world to keep the community together. The speakers over those years have been incredible. Seth Godin taught us about marketing and storytelling. Chris Voss taught us about negotiation and sales. Jocko Willing taught us about extreme ownership and resilience. Lisa Nichols taught us to believe in ourselves. Todd Herman taught us about identity and performance. And there's so many more, dozens more. But here's what I've learned the speakers aren't the only thing that make the summit valuable. I mean, it's cool to get their autograph on their book, isn't it? But it's the gym owners in the room that make it the most valuable. It's the conversations at lunch. We're not putting vendors on the stage so that they can sell you their stuff. They're in the room. You can talk to them, you can ask them questions. We're putting people on stage that will make you money and make a difference in your life, right? Those conversations at lunch are important. The late night problem-solving sessions, those have existed since day one. The friendships that form and the accountability partnerships that emerge. We guide you to make those. We introduce you to people. We do fun workouts. We do great stuff. In 2024 and 2025, we sold out at a thousand seats. There was a waiting list. People snuck in. They admitted it to me later. I remember being on the Savant show and somebody called in and was like, hey, snuck into your summit. I would have bought a ticket, but there weren't any available, so I snuck in. How do I send you money? This is the stuff that happens when an event is valuable. You show up, you fly to Chicago, you don't even have a ticket, and you bang on the door to get in. This year we're celebrating the 10th anniversary of Two Brain at the Hyatt in the Rose at Rosemont, June 6th and 7th. Mike McAllowitz is headlining. If you don't know Mike, he's the author of Profit First, Clockwork, Fix This Next, The Pumpkin Plan. He's been where you are. He's built companies. He's failed. He's succeeded. He's a great storyteller, and he has a system for building a business that doesn't consume your entire life. In short, he knows how to make a difference, make an impact, make a profit, and make it home for dinner. I'll be giving a keynote. We're looking back at 10 years of two brain, the top lessons, sharing what we've learned about what actually works and looking forward to the next 10 years. I'm going to try and distill all of this into a presentation that's even shorter than this podcast, but actually give you some new stuff too about what it takes to have a successful gym. If you've never been to the Summit, this is the year to come. And if you've been before, then you already know why you need to be there. Go to twoBrainsummit.com to get your tickets. I've had so many of favorite moments at Summit over the years, but the best ones are always in person. And most of them involve eating barbecue too. That's why we love doing it at Rosemont. There's something for everybody. The entertainment, the area takes care of itself for entertainment. So many gym owners have so many breakthroughs, conversations, life-changing moments at Summit. That's why I love doing it. The mentorship practice at TwoBrain is more than just one-on-one delivery of the Two Brain program. Over 10 years, we've collected the solutions for every problem in the gym business. Those solutions keep changing. And that means we have to constantly upgrade what we're teaching. We upgrade the system. When something is working, it goes in. When something isn't working as well, it comes out. New stuff has to be better than the old stuff. We're doing science here and we're helping you implement science so that your gym doesn't just look like a random experiment all the time. We've also learned that most gym owners need to fix themselves before they can fix their business. And that's why we focus so heavily on giving you habits and skills that will make you a better leader as part of the mentorship program. We've learned that gym owners don't just need more information. They need somebody to help them apply the right information to their specific situation. That's why one-on-one mentorship works. Just like your clients don't need a new workout program that they can Google or something that's written by ChatGPT. They need a coach to actually change their lives. We've learned that different stages of business require different strategies. A new gym owner has different needs than someone who's been running a profitable gym for five years. And that's why we created distinct programs for founders and farmers and tinkers. And we've learned that community matters. Gym owners who surround themselves with other successful gym owners grow faster and avoid more mistakes. That's why the summit exists. And we've learned that this work matters. Most importantly, every gym owner we help is changing lives in their community. It's not a ripple effect, it's a tidal wave effect. We change one life at Summit. They go home and change 10 lives at their gym. Those people each change lives in their workplace, in their family, among their best friends. And as the tide grows, we eventually can change our culture and society around fitness. When you succeed, your clients succeed. When your clients succeed, their families succeed. That wave grows and grows and becomes enormous. Ten years in, I am more excited about this work than ever. We have mentors around the world helping gym owners every single day. We have systems that work. We have data that proves what works and what doesn't. We have a community of gym owners who are building businesses they're really proud of, businesses that serve their families and their communities, and we'll continue to do so. The next 10 years will be about deepening that impact. We're going to continue to refine our systems. We're going to continue to test everything before we tell you anything. We'll continue to train world-class mentors, and we'll continue to bring gym owners together at the summit. It's my 10th anniversary. It's our 10th anniversary. Thank you for being so such a big part of this project. TwoBrain is not about the ideas that happen in my head. They're about catching the best practices, the best ideas, the best proven strategies from you, putting them all in one place, and teaching everybody together. TwoBrain is more than just a community. It's a partnership between thousands of gyms around the world. And anyone that doesn't collaborate weakens the whole. But everyone who does strengthens our entire industry. The fitness industry has never been stronger than it is right now. And it's because of your participation, your willingness to share, and your curiosity to find out what others are doing. Thank you for all of that. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. If you want to talk about the next step for yourself, let's figure out what you need together. Just book a call with my team, click the link below this video, and we'll give you some guidance on what your next best step should be.