What's the Real Reason Your Gym Isn’t Growing?

You have access to endless knowledge and resources, but you can’t seem to put it all together and fix your gym. Why?

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper walks you through the mind of a mentor—showing you exactly how they diagnose problems, prioritize solutions and guide gym owners step by step.

He reveals the three reasons gym owners need more money:

- Expenses are too high.
- Number of clients is too low.
- Average revenue per member (ARM) is too low.

Many gym owners say, “I need more leads,” but that’s rarely the real issue. Chris maps out the actual problem-solving process so you can identify your biggest priority.

He explains how to get more clients, increase retention and earn more per member.

You don’t need more knowledge to grow your gym; you need clarity and a step-by-step plan.

Links

Gym Owners United

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3:24 - Earn more per member

8:44 - More clients, longer retention

16:51 - Understand your lead funnel

24:43 - The four marketing funnels

33:18 - Make time to grow your gym

Transcript

Chris 0:02

It sometimes takes an experienced eye, an objective expert, to look at your gym and say, let's fix this thing, let's do this first. And today I want to walk you through that process. I want to take you through the mind of a mentor as they are discerning, like what your first step is, what you should do first, and what tool you need to actually help build the gym. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Runner Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to talk about why you know the answers, but you can't seem to put them all together and change your gym, why there are no simple solutions, no quick fixes to fixing your gym, and why knowledge is just not enough. We publish free materials every single day at Tube Rate. And we do this to help you solve your biggest problems in the gym so that you can grow and help more people and change the health of this world that we live in. But the reason that we're a mentorship practice instead of just a book publishing company or a media company is because a mentor will take all the information that's available out there, sort through it, and say, do this today. And that is the crux. And I want to walk you through that right now. Now, to start with, every gym says, I need more leads or I need more clients because they don't always understand what they actually need in their business. Maybe they do need more clients, but the first question to ask is, why do you need more clients? Okay, so let's let's start with this. Let's talk about like what every gym owner will say is the number one thing that they need in their business. And it's usually more clients. Now, what a mentor is going to do is dig a little bit deeper and say, Why do you need more clients? And the gym owner will say, Well, because I need to I need more money, I need more revenue coming into my business. Right. And you know, from there we're gonna dig a little bit deeper. But the real answer to the question, what do you need? is I need more revenue. Okay. And so from there, we're gonna ask the question, well, why do you need more revenue? And the gym owner is gonna say, I'm not making enough money, or I'm barely breaking even, maybe, or maybe even I'm losing money, right? And of course, quite often they'll say, if this keeps going, I'm gonna be out of business because the rent is gonna keep going up over time, or I'm running out of my savings, or my family can't keep supporting my gym business. Okay. Now, there's really three reasons why you need more money. Well, either your expenses are too high. So our expenses are high, too high, or the you know, the number of clients that we have is actually too low. That could be true, or the ARM, the average revenue per member that you have in your gym, is also too low. It could be any one of those. Those are really the three reasons that you're not making enough revenue. Okay, so if your expenses are too high, well, it's kind of a tough nut to crack. So we start by figuring out where you can get better leverage on your expenses. Okay, so we can look at your rent and we can look at what you're paying your staff, and we we can look at the smaller expenses too. What are you paying for your booking and building software, et cetera? All right. But that is a tough thing to fix. It's a tough nut to crack, as I said. So let's look at like what is the easiest thing to fix right now? Well, it's probably going to be ARM. It's actually easier to make more per client than it is to get more clients. So we're gonna actually start there. And if we say, you know, why is your average revenue per member so low? Well, it could be that you don't have an onboarding program or you charge too little or you don't have enough options for clients who want more. Okay, so let's take it, let's just break that down here a little bit. And let's say, well, there's really three reasons here. Okay, uh, no onboarding program. No onboarding. That's the first one. The second one is that you're just like you don't have your clients aren't paying enough, right? Not paying enough. And the third reason, just as valid, is that too few options. You don't really have product market fit, okay? Because what's going on is people are coming in and they want to work out, they want this to lose this, you know, certain amount of weight, or they've got this super goal. And you say, okay, we've got this group training program, and they're like, wait a minute, I can't make those classes, or you know, that's not what I want. And so, really, you have to have two or three different options to train people where they're at. Okay. So maybe like that's the thing first. So, what we always want to do here is say, what is the easiest thing to fix first? And then fix that thing. Now, if we look at these three options, okay. Not charging enough. Here we go. That is a complicated problem that requires a deeper dive. So let's actually start with the easy one. Let's add an onboarding program. We're gonna do that first. Boom. Okay, that's really, really easy. We add an on-ramp and we could build that probably in about three hours. And it's actually kind of fun. Okay. Then from there, the second step that we can take is to add a couple of options for clients who want more. So maybe 10% of your clients are going to want personal training, for example, because they want the flexibility of appointments instead of like fitting in your schedule. Maybe they want the privacy, maybe they've got some special need. Um, you know, maybe they just like you and they want to work one-on-one. Okay. So use the state of the industry data to figure out what secondary option you should add. But like personal training is a pretty good bet, right? And it's a good one also because it complements your on-ramp program. So now, here we go. We've got a couple of ways to generate more revenue with just additions. Okay. So if 10% of your clients want some personal training, that's great because those clients will actually pay about three times, two to three times what your average group client is paying anyway. We can, again, like we can build this just in a couple of hours. Then we can say, let's start fixing the pricing problem by charging the right amount to new clients coming in. Okay. So we would go to that third. That's pretty simple. Changing your rates for your long-term clients is tough. Um, and we'll come back to that later after we take a look at your churn rate. But before you can sell anything at a higher rate, you have to know how to sell. So now we've got to build a sales process called the no-sweat intro, and we need to role-play that until you feel comfortable with it. We got a few hours of work there, but that practice will never end because it's not just a matter of like telling you what to do. Okay. So the next thing that we have to build here is people coming in. We need a sales process, don't we? And we're going to call that a no sweat intro, just to give you a template to use so you don't have to dream this up on your own. Okay. And that's, I'm just going to call that NSI for short. Once you learn that process, then you can start selling your on-ramp better. You can start presenting your options to new clients a lot better. And this will also come in very, very handy later on as we as we get going. Okay. But again, this is not like a oh, you need a better sales process, high five. That'll be a thousand dollars. I'm out. This is you need to build a sales process. We need to build a sales binder. We need to look at your options and your pricing and train you on how to present those. Sales is the first act of coaching. I've said that now probably a million times on this podcast. The sales process gets a bad rap, and we're scared of it because we don't want to feel slimy or like we're tricking anybody. But sales is really your opportunity to coach somebody to change their life. And that just doesn't happen by reading a book about it or having a script to follow. Sales takes practice, it takes reps. You need to feel it the right way so that you don't feel uncomfortable with it and so that you can do it in the right way. And once you're good at that with coaching, mentorship, feedback, role play, that is when you can start to stack wins in these other categories. All right. So the sales process starts with the NSI, but it continues forever. Okay. So now we can actually start to look at that whole not enough clients metric. Now we need to ask ourselves some deeper questions. Are you lacking clients because you're not signing enough up or because they're not staying long enough? Right. So now the topics actually get a little bit longer. So there's two reasons that you might not be getting enough clients. The first one is not enough new clients. So new clients are too low. And the other reason is clients are leaving. Too soon, too often, too frequently. So from there we can say, well, is the problem that you know you're not getting enough new people in the door, or is that you're not keeping them long enough? All right. These get longer. So let's start by building a sticky net so that we don't waste or or you know churn through the new leads that we're going to get in a moment, so that we don't just waste the appointments that we're going to get, or so that we don't burn through the new clients that you sign up faster than we have to. Okay. Now, the way that we're going to measure this is called leg length of engagement. We want to try and keep everybody for two years. And I know a lot of you think like, well, the average person is probably around for two years. But what you're actually thinking about are your best clients. They're the ones that stick out in your brain. They're the ones you think about because you see them for a long time, you see them often. And of course, they're around for two years, but that's not the average in most gyms. Most gyms average is about 13 months. And that's when people wash out. We need to keep them longer, or else you'll be in this constant churn rate of marketing, marketing, marketing to just replace the ones that you're losing. And that's where most gyms are. So we got to start by having this sticky net. Now, luckily, one of the best ways to improve your length of engagement is to onboard people properly. And that means we got to start with an on-ramp. Aha, very good. So here's what's really cool. We've already built an on-ramp process. Boom, there it is. That's one of the best ways to improve leg. And now what we've got to do is we've got to extend that out. So that onboarding process that you wrote already probably lasts about maybe two weeks. We want to extend that to about 90 days to really get people on board, to have a chance to make some friends, to get used to the schedule, to shift their life and their habits around so that you know they're they really are engaged in your gym and they've made space for that in their lives. Okay. So what we want to do here is build a client journey. And we're going to map this out with your mentor. Like what happens day one? What happens day two? What happens day five? What happens day 28? We're going to put emails to keep people engaged. We're going to put um knowledge, you know, videos, whatever to keep people engaged to. We're going to remind ourselves to like call this person and check in with them. Okay. But one of the most important things we're going to do is we're going to make an appointment with them at the 90-day mark called a goal review. Now, this is so important because this is when you get together with the client after they've done their first 90 days and you say, Here's your progress. Now that progress might not be like obvious to them. They might not even realize what kind of progress they are making. You need to put them on the scale. You need to take the measurement. You need to say, like, here's your scores or here's your best lifts. Okay. That is why goal reviews are actually so, so, so important to client retention long term. Because the first plan that you make somebody is going to be better than what they're currently doing, but it's not going to be the best plan for them for the rest of their life. You need to tweak that plan. And every time you tweak that plan, you build more and more trust with the client, not because changing things is what keeps them around, but because narrowing in on the best plan for them has sunk costs. And that shows the client that you are invested in them and you're helping them make long-term progress. If they went and started over with somebody else, they'd have to start that whole process from scratch. It's like a physician dialing in a medicine dose with a client. And that's what you're doing dosage, intensity, all of that. That's the point of a goal review. And goal reviews are the number one thing that you can do to keep people around longer. Now, how do we know like how to do a goal review? Well, okay, that is gonna take a little bit of a script, right? So we're gonna want a script in there for you to practice. It's gonna take some emails and reminders because your existing clients are not used to this, and they're gonna say, What is this all about? But a goal review is also where we make a new prescription. And sometimes that prescription might include some of these other options that you're going to be offering to them, right? Well, you know, I'm not making great progress. Okay, let's talk about other options. What it might also include is a downgrade that could happen. Hey, I know things are getting busy at work. Why don't we dial it back to three classes a week? That way you're ahead of the cancellation. In fact, what I want to do really briefly here is just talk to you about the flow of a goal review. This is really, really, really important. So when a client comes in, they're doing their goal review, we say, Hey Mary Jane, I think you've made some great progress, but let's check. You put her on the in-body and you compare against like, you know, the previous stats. And if she came in and she didn't care about her weight or body clump, then measure what she did care about. Okay. Like that's what's important here, not having an in-body or any other biometric scan or having doing a DEX or any of that stuff. What's important is that you're measuring what the client cares about. You present them with their results and you say, I'm so proud of you. Are you perfectly happy with these results? Okay. From there, they're going to get give you one of three responses. The first response is, Yes, I am thrilled with these results. Wonderful. I'm so proud of you. You know, there's a lot of people in our community who could really stand to be inspired by your story. I think it's inspirational. Would you mind sharing that story? You pull your phone and you say, Mary Jane, you know, what brought you to Catalyst in the first place? Uh, what else had you tried? What advice would you give to the person you used to be a year ago? Something like that. If Mary Jane says, Yeah, you know, I'm I'm pretty happy with my results. I just wish it was happening faster. Ha ha, now's your opportunity to make a new prescription. And you say, okay, well, if I were in your shoes, here's what I would do to speed up the process. Maybe it's adding a nutrition plan, maybe it's a habits challenge, you know, maybe it's adding some personal training. And if she says, honestly, I don't know, I don't, I'm not seeing a lot of results, perfect. I mean, she's telling you that and giving you the opportunity to change the prescription and try something else instead of her leaving and trying something else on her own, like quitting and going to another gym. That's how important these goal reviews are. And we want to build that sticky net before we start looking at like getting more clients in, or else the new clients that come in are just going to wash out the way that your current clients are. So finally, now let's talk about okay, it's time to actually get more clients. So, why aren't you getting more clients? Now, this is a big complicated problem. All right, it could be one of several things, right? So the first reason you're not getting clients is not enough leads. Leads are too low. Okay. Um, that's one problem. Uh, are you getting leads, but they're not turning into opportunities like appointments? Okay. So another problem could be appointments are too low. You're getting leads, but they're not doing anything. Or is it that you're getting appointments and you know they're not converting, they're not signing up. Your sales are too low. All right. Now, you probably already have some people in your funnel. So let's not pour more people in until we know that you can sign up the ones that you already have. Now, I'm gonna actually just draw this out for you. Okay, so let's just take a look and I'm gonna use a different color here. Let's let's call this your funnel. So your marketing funnel in general looks like this, and it has three parts. The first is leads. Okay, that's people who are paying attention to you. The second is appointments. We want these these leads to actually do something, and that is to book a non-sweat intro at your gym. And the third is sales. I'm just gonna make a dollar sign. These are the people who show up for an appointment and actually sign up, okay? What we were gonna do here is we're gonna actually start from the bottom first. We're gonna go one, two, and then three. We want to know that your sales process is dialed before we start spending money on getting more leads or spending time or spending energy. Then we want to know that you're good at lead nurture. Okay, let's talk about that here really briefly. Because if we're gonna spend time, money, and energy getting leads, we want to know that we can get them to appointments. Okay, so we would call this lead to gen, lead generation, we would call the this lead to nurture, and we would call this probably sales. All right. So the question is you know, are we lacking leads? Are we lacking appointments or are we lacking sales? And we we want to do an audit of those. So that means we need to track some metrics here. Okay, so we want to track leads. If you aren't sure how to track leads, then you can't say for sure that you need more leads because we just don't know. We need a way to track what we call a set rate, okay. How many of those leads, how many of the people who hit your website book an appointment? And we want to track show rate, which are both part of lead nurture. So how many leads book an appointment and how many of those appointments actually show up? And then we want to track close rate, how many of those people actually buy? Okay. So what we want to do is we want to start at the bottom of the funnel. Now, here's the cool thing. Earlier when we were working on ARM, we actually did a little bit of work on this, didn't we? We set ourselves up for success here by learning a no-sweat intro process and practicing that no sweat intro process, becoming very good and confident and smooth in that process is what boosts your close rate right here. Okay. So the work that we did earlier is really going to help us out here. All right. Now, before we get into lead nurture, I want to make a point. Everything that we've done so far has required you to measure what you're currently doing. And that takes time if you haven't done it before. I can help you and I can make that process as fast and painless as possible. But if you're not measuring these things, then we're just guessing. And that's what leads most gyms to think, I just need more leads because they're not measuring. But good mentors will have you measuring everything from day one. And, you know, maybe the first time you do it, it's not that fun, like doing an overhead squat. And it's not fast the first time either, but it will make you a good business owner in the long term. You will get good at it, you will get fast at it really, really quickly, and you'll be able to make decisions based on these metrics really quickly. Any business coach who doesn't have you measuring this stuff is just selling you their guesses on top of your own guesses without any basis for making decisions or prioritizing anything. Okay. They aren't helping you long term, they're not helping you become a better business coach or a better business owner. And that's why the mentors and coaches at TubeBrain focus so hard on this stuff. So let's have a look at lead nurture. Here we go. How fast are you calling leads? Okay, so here we are. Now, lead nurture can be improved by improving your speed of contact. Okay, that's that's one way. Um, how are you continuing the conversation with them once you get them? You know, are you chatting? Are you are you having a conversation, right? How quickly are you booking them in for a no-sweat intro? Do they have to wait a week to talk to you when they might regret it and want to change or have something come up? How many times do you call them back? Okay, so speed of contact is one, but like frequency of contact. You know, a lot of us don't call leads at all. Something like 13% of gym owners in the Of the industry guy had said that they never called leads. So the let me just give you context here. These are people who have reached a point in their lives when they have said, enough is enough. I don't like myself. I need to change. And they've got the courage to like pick up the phone and they're calling you. This is just like them being in the water, drowning with their hand up, waving like this. Okay. Do you turn your back on these people? Or do you actually get over your own internal BS about fear of rejection and all that other crap and call them? And if they don't answer the first time, do you automatically assume that it was a mistake and they don't want to talk to you and you'll be harassing them and they'll hate you and they'll embarrass you or they'll shoot you down if you call them back? Or do you say, they must be busy? I'll try again. You know, the average person takes four or five tries to actually pick up the phone. I don't know about you, but if I don't recognize the number, I don't answer the first time. But if I get a message and then that person calls back, I always answer every single time, 10 times out of 10. And you'll find that most people are like this too. If they don't want to hear from you, they will tell you. But the best gyms call their leads between four and six times. They're not tricking them. They are saying, I see you in the water. I see your hand is up. Can I help you? That is what calling leads does. Now, if we look at lead nurture and we say you're not doing these things, then we would be crazy to spend all kinds of time and money getting more leads instead of fixing these basic problems. I mean, think about leads as like water flowing into your funnel. Okay. So right now you've got some leads coming in, no matter what you do. Do they flow out because they don't know how to get in touch with you or they don't know what to do? You've got a bad website. Do they flow right out because nobody called them back? Do they flow right out because they're not convinced when they come into your gym that they actually want to change their lives? You haven't coached them to make a change. You know, which one of these things is like the reason that they are flowing out? And before we start pouring more into your funnel, we want to fix those leaks. Until we solve those, there's no sense investing more time, money, and energy into getting more leads because you're just wasting them. You have a leaky bucket, and no matter how much water you pour into that bucket, you're never going to have enough to drink. So now, here we go. Finally, let's look at how you're generating leads. Now, I drew you here a really basic marketing funnel. Okay. Notice that it starts at the top with like a big gap. You're getting a hundred people in there, and then it narrows as people filter out and say, Oh, this is not for me. And then it comes to a fine point when you ask people, are you ready to start? And they give you their credit card. That's natural. We want to keep that funnel as big as we can. But more than that, we actually want to build four different funnels. Okay. Because while one funnel is great and having a system to get you leads, I mean, that's that's amazing. We want to have systemic marketing happening. And that means four funnels running at once. The first funnel that we're going to be building is called your referral funnel. Now, what does a referral funnel start with? It starts with a goal review. Okay. So we set up goal reviews with our clients. And remember, I walked you through this earlier? Goal review. Aha. Client comes in. Are you perfectly satisfied with your progress? Yes, I am. Ecstatic. Great. You can get their story. Or you could be a great coach and you can say, you know, I know your husband Dave has been working on bringing down his handicap in the golf game. What if he came in for a personal training session with you, me, and him, and we did a little assessment and I gave him some tips. That is how you do um referral marketing. How you don't do referral marketing is you don't ask, like, hey, who wants 20% off next month if they refer a friend? Or refer a friend and get two months free. Okay. So goal review, invite. Okay, come and do a private session with us. And then NSI. Dave, while I've got you here, let's sit down and talk about your goals. And you go through that exact same NSI process. Boom, right there. Okay. Once you've got that NSI process down, you're going to be using it over and over and over again. That's the referral funnel. And we want to build that funnel first because that funnel multiplies the other funnels. If you get a lead through a Facebook ad later and you can turn that into two clients with a referral funnel, you've just doubled your ROI on Facebook leads. If you get a new client from organic social media or from content marketing, which we're going to talk about, adding the referral funnel first means that you can duplicate those people. And the best thing is you already know this. The best new clients come from our current clients because they're already filtered for pricing, for scheduling, for having a friend in the gym. Okay. So you have the infrastructure now. You've got the goal reviews, right? We just need to be consistent with those and do them forever. But let's talk about what to say and let's role play, like we did with our goal review up here. Now that's going to be a few hours work. You learn how to do it, you get comfortable with it, and you keep practicing it forever. After we've got your referral funnel, the next funnel that we're going to be building is your social funnel to social. Okay. Where does the social funnel start? Well, it starts with content. Okay, now notice I'm not changing the NSI here because that is going to be consistent across all of our four funnels. That's why you have to get good at it. So social funnel, you make a post to get attention. Okay. Or to start a conversation or to get them to raise their hand. From there, you're going to do something that's called sell by chat. You're going to chat with them as if you were humans talking to each other in the coffee shop line. Now, this sounds simple, but you need a template to start with so that you can parrot our template until you get comfortable and then you tweak it a little bit. Don't just assume that you're good at this. It takes practice, it takes mentorship and coaching and feedback and role play, like all these other things. Okay. And, you know, so you've got a few hours work here. What are you posting? Well, I want you to post three times a day for 30 days and watch what happens. Okay. So again, I can't just tell you to do this at your gym in one day and have you succeed at it. You have to be coached through it. You have to do these things one at a time. So your second funnel is going to be social. Your third funnel is going to be content. Now, I've been telling people to create more content since at least 2013. That's the earliest post I could find from myself telling people to produce more content. It was really a huge advantage back then. Now it's a necessity, especially because a lot of the people who are searching for gyms and workouts and trainers and coaches are doing it with AI. You have to have content out there for the AI or the human to find. That means you need to have like a quick cast or a blog or a YouTube channel. Okay. So content is the name of the game here. So content is at the top. Okay. So they watch, they read your blog, they watch your YouTube, they listen to your quick cast. And from there, you've got a call to action that might send them to your email list. Okay. Or sometimes it might also be sell by chat. It could be sell by chat here too. That's a great skill. So you don't have to learn all of these skills over and over. Once you got the NSI, you can use that in all four funnels. If you know how to do sell by chat, you can use that in at least two funnels, probably three. I'm going to show you another one in a minute. And once you've got this content, you don't have to keep rebuilding it again. Okay. So how often are you making a blog post, emailing your list, creating a video on YouTube or producing a quick cast, a podcast? After 30 days of social media posting, you should have a good idea what topics will be popular with your audience. So let's start this. It will take you at least 30 days to build this habit. And again, this isn't something I can just tell you to do. You need some coaching to hold you accountable to it. Because the first time you do it, just like your metrics, just like your social posts, you're going to hate it. You're not going to like it. It's going to feel hard. Or maybe on day four, you run out of topic ideas or whatever. You need somebody to say, now do this, now do that. So we give you 30 days of prompts and you execute on that for a full month. That month is not complicated. It's not like a secret. But what it does is it builds the habit that you will keep for the next 30 years. Now, only after we've got these three funnels, only then do we recommend adding paid ads. Paid ads work, but if you don't have these other three funnels in place, the paid ads will just be a shot in the dark at a moving target that doesn't care about you, know about you, or want to hear from you. So that means that the leads that you get will be cold, they will be unprepared, and they probably won't even show up. Now it's going to take you about two weeks to build out the paid ads funnel. It's the simplest funnel to build, but it is a waste of time and money without the other three funnels. All right. So if I look at all of this, and I didn't even break down your expenses, right? Like we could we could go deep into the expenses here. We could uh measure ROI. We could systematically cut some, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't go into uh raising rates. All I've done with you so far is go through the basic, like fix these things. And I know this seems like a lot, like months and months of work, right? But this is the actual work of running a gym. We didn't talk in here about like programming or cleaning your bathrooms. We didn't talk about how to deliver a good personal training program or how to switch to small group. But this is the actual work. These are the fundamentals that every gym has to have in place before it pivots its model, before it thinks about like affiliating, deaffiliating, you know, adding uh this thing, that thing, starting a new kids program, hiring five new coaches. This is what you have to have in place first because this is the actual work of running a gym. This is what you do when you're wearing your CEO hat. So let's quickly talk about like why most gym owners actually fail. Now, five years ago, maybe even three years ago, it was because they didn't know what to do. They looked at this, they had kind of some estimation of all of this going on in their head, and they said, like, I don't even know where to start. I get it, right? But that's not true anymore. We publish guides on all of these things every day for free at Two Brain, and we have now for a decade. So go in gymwalnersunited.com and you will find step-by-step guides for every single thing that I have talked about in this presentation. But let's talk about the real investment that you make in mentorship and a mentor makes in you, and that is the investment of time. Now, if you already know all of this stuff that I've talked about, or even if you are hearing it for the first time, but it makes sense, and you're not already acting on it, it's not because you're dumb. It's not because you're unmotivated, it's because you don't have time. You don't have time to think about it, you don't have time to decide where to start. And so you default to like, hey, Chris, I just need, you know, I need more clients, man. More clients will like solve all of my problems. I just need this, just get me this, just get me that. That's because you don't have time or mental bandwidth to consider like this entire big picture, and you don't have experience doing it because you've never done it before. Okay. So the the reason is you don't have time to think about it. You don't have time to do it, you don't have time to spend 30 minutes every day doing one of these things and building. And you look at this and you think, like, my God, that's months and months of work. There's no way I have time to do that right now. I'm busy. Of course you are. And that's because you will never find time. You have to make time. So let's start here. Every day, what time do you go to work on your business? When are you wearing the CEO hat? When do you do this stuff? What time is like the close the door, shut off the phone, and do the CEO work time? That's really important to know. We have to carve that time out. We have to make it before we can do anything else because just learning this stuff is an absolute waste if you're not going to go out there and do it. We want to make the time. Golden hour. This is the habit of working out your business. We need to start by setting up that block of time when you are the CEO. Okay. Until you understand that running a gym is a different job than just being a good coach. You will not carve out this time and you will not be able to do any of these things, which are all necessary to have a successful gym. Now, once you've got that golden hour carved out, you can buy back some time. Yes, this hour is probably going to be another hour on your day at first, but quickly working with a mentor, you can buy back time to make room for these tasks and start getting them done faster. Now, this is a lot, right? There's even more. What do you mean I can't even get started on this stuff? Well, a mentor's job is to get you through all of this in a year. Now that's about four times faster than I did it on my own. Maybe you're a super dedicated student and you can do it all on your own in three years. Okay. You you use the free resources from TwoBrain, you watch this video, you take screenshots, you go incrementally. That's cool. It's going to take you two to three years. Okay. I know it's not sexy for me to say that. And I know that's not what other business coaches are promising. They are telling you they're going to get you 30 clients in 30 days. They're going to give you the top 10 tips over five months, and we're going to have a complete business transformation in 90 days. That's all bullshit. It takes time. Every mistake that you make in your business will take you at least six months to fix. I've made every mistake and it took me years. You can probably do this in three years on your own, but when you buy coaching, you are buying speed. Just like your clients are buying speed from you instead of trying to figure out their weight loss all on their own. Okay. They are hiring a personal trainer so that they have an appointment to get the work done. You're hiring a mentor so that you have an appointment to get the work done. Do you see how this works? So a mentor has to juggle all of this stuff with you. And if you come into the program thinking, I'm going to learn what to do, then you're right, but not right. Because we don't sell a course, we don't sell information or secrets or knowledge. What we sell is results. And that the speed at which you get those results depends on the speed at which you do the work. Period. In fact, if you do the work, it looks like a straight line graph. You start here, wherever your gym is starting. Here's the work. You do the work, you move to the right. Here's the gym you want to go to. Ta-da, your perfect day. If you do the work faster, the line doesn't change. It's not like you unlock different secrets or that you know people who know different things are going faster. What happens is you just move the line up. You get there faster. Okay. If you do the work faster, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, you get here in a year. Well, it's taking these dudes three years. That's all. The mentor is there to help you implement. It's not which parts of the two-brain program you need to do or which parts work better or which mentor is going to teach me the most. It's how fast can I execute? And that is all. The mentor is there to help you execute fast. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. If you can't tell, I'm pretty damn passionate about coaching, whether for business or for fitness. If you want to talk about this, just go to gymownersunited.com and we have these kind of conversations all the time. We give away our knowledge for free, but we sell our coaching. And that's because coaching is what gets you to the results faster. Instead of waiting for 10 years trying to figure it out yourself and find your way out of the maze, get a coach and build all this stuff in a year. Instead of taking three years to like implement every free resource that we give you, which is fine. Implement one, make some money, and then hire a mentor so that you're not spending extra time going through reps and trying to figure it all out on your own. Thank you for everything that you do. Hopefully, you do exactly the same for your clients as I just did for you, and you're successful long term in changing the lives of thousands of people in your community.