Why Your Gym Feels Stuck (And What to Do Next)

Get Chris Cooper’s book “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief” free on Kindle this week (Jul. 27-31): https://twobrain.co/4gLvR5E

If you’re a gym owner who feels stuck, you probably don’t need more information. You need focus.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper joins CEO John Franklin to break down the four distinct phases of the entrepreneurial journey, based on his book “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief.”

Chris explains why the Founder phase is about narrowing to one clear product and getting good at conversations and invitations—not diversifying or over-investing in space and staff. He shares the story of nearly running out of money and being told by his own mentor that he wasn’t ready for marketing yet.

From there, Chris and John walk through the Farmer phase (buying back your time instead of hiring your clone), the high-risk Tinker phase (where entrepreneurs often blow up what’s working by chasing shiny new ideas), and the Chief phase, where the goal shifts from personal wealth to building a legacy that multiplies impact beyond any one person.

Chris also shares real stories from his own journey, including the mentor who talked him out of opening a coffee shop and the moment that reshaped how he thinks about giving back.

Tune in to figure out exactly which phase of entrepreneurship you’re in right now, and what to focus on to move forward.

Several of Chris’ other books are also free on Kindle this week, including “Start a Gym” and “Millionaire Gym Owner.” Grab your copies via the link below.

Links

"Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief"

More Free Books

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

0:00 - The four stages every gym owner goes through

0:50 - Why Chris rewrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief”

3:36 - How to escape the Founder phase

7:34 - Why more leads won’t fix your gym

10:50 - When you’ve officially become a Farmer

12:02 - The hiring mistake almost every gym owner makes

19:45 - Why successful gym owners get distracted

24:39 - How Tinker gym owners build lasting wealth

28:00 - What the Chief phase really looks like

31:13 - How to create a legacy beyond your gym

Transcript

John 0:02

If you're a gym owner that feels stuck, you don't need more information. You need to focus. The reality is there's only four distinct phases of the entrepreneurial journey, and you need to know how to assess which one you are in and what to do to get out of it. That's why today I'm going to be talking with TwoBrain's founder, Chris Cooper, who recently wrote the book Founder, Farmer, Tinker Chief, that goes over each of those stages and what you need to be doing to get unstuck. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of TwoBrain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship practice, working with over 3,000 gym owners to take home over six figures in profit because yes, it is possible. By the end of this episode, you're going to know exactly what phase you're in and how to get out of it. Let's get into it. So one of the most common issues we hear from gym owners is that they have trouble focusing. It's not a lack of information, it's that there's too much. And to combat that problem, you wrote this book. And this is uh founder, farmer, tinker chief. This is the third iteration of this book. Chris, why do you feel compelled to write this a third time?

Chris 1:06

Well, number one, information changes. The stuff from my earlier books might be a little bit outdated. But the big thing that really pushed me to write this book is hitting the chief phase myself. And originally when I wrote the book, it was called Founder, Farmer, Tinker Thief. And my thinking was after you've achieved a certain wealth number, you just become Robin Hood and you start giving it away. And you take, you know, your time and attention and you give it to people who need the help. And what I kept hearing as more and more people became wealthy through our program, hitting that million dollar net worth is I'm not done. I want to get back into this. What's the next step? And being exposed to more and more leaders in the space, studying leaders, what did they do next? I started realizing that there is kind of a formula for building a legacy, for building a movement that outlasts you, that grows under its own momentum. And that formula is repeated over and over. And there are parts of the book that come from the Catholic Church. There are parts that come from CrossFit, for example. There's a lot of different stories in there about how you can actually build a movement that spreads without you. And so I wanted to evolve the book to be more reflective of what is possible and aspirational for an entrepreneur instead of just like, I'm done, I'm going to start giving my money away.

John 2:26

And so for someone who hasn't read it yet, yeah, there are four distinct phases of entrepreneurship.

Chris 2:32

Yeah.

John 2:33

And there's things that you should be focusing on for each distinct phase. And there are certain mindset things that you should be focusing on as well. 100%. And I think part of the message you're trying to communicate is that some of those things that got you into good shape in one phase can actually hold you back in other phases.

Chris 2:53

Very true.

John 2:54

So I thought it would be fun if we went through and talked through each of the phases and maybe told a story of each one. Sure. And some of the things that trip people up in that phase itself.

Chris 3:06

Okay. Yeah. So before we start, like one thing that's really important to understand is that these phases are not time bound. I was in the founder phase for probably the first eight years of owning my gym. You don't move on to the next phase until you've acquired the skills of that phase. So we'll get into that more specifically.

John 3:25

And you can also go backwards, right? Something that happens a lot. My my I'm I just keep going backwards. I never never never seem to make it out of this farmer phase here. All right. So let's let's start with founder. Okay. What is the founder phase?

Chris 3:39

The founder phase is when you're just trying to get something viable going and you're trying to make revenue exceed your expenses. You're probably a single person operation. You're grinding, you're hustling. This is when you are working all the hours of the day. And your goal is just build something that's profitable as quickly as you possibly can so that you can move into the farmer phase and get some help. There are a few things that really trip people up here. And there's also some skills that you can only develop in the founder phase, but they will magnify and multiply once you get to the higher level phases, too. The thing is, when I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, they're five years in, they're 10 years in. Maybe they've built a bigger business. Their top line revenue is higher, they've got more space, they're now employing six people, but the business is still not profitable. So everybody's making more money. The staff's making more money, the government's making more money in taxes, the landlord's making more money, but you're not. You're still fighting to get profitable. And you realize you've bought yourself a job with the worst boss in the universe, that's yourself. Before you can move on and get out of that pattern, you've got to solve the founder phase problems.

John 4:49

So to be clear, the hallmark of the founder phase is the owner is still frenetic, running around, hustling, doing everything. And you may or may not have staff. Is that what I'm hearing? Like you can be a founder but still have staff, but the business is entirely reliant on the owner and were the owner to leave, everything would break.

Chris 5:11

Yeah. In the simplest example, the founder doesn't have any staff helping them yet. But the reality is that most of us opened up and immediately hired staff because we thought we should. But nobody told us when we opened our business that we would have to learn how to manage people. And that's a nightmare. It would have been a deal breaker for a lot of people. You know, it's really interesting in the fitness industry what percentage of gym owners were not entrepreneurs before. This is our first business. And we don't realize you have to be good at managing people. But before you even get to managing people, or before you should even hire anybody else, you have to be really, really clear at what your product is, who you're selling it to, and how to sell it really effectively. And I think a lot of people get five or 10 years in and you say, okay, what do you sell? And they're not sure. You know, I'm selling constantly, very functional movement, perform at high intensity. And I have personal training and I have group training and I have guitar lessons. And instead, what you need to do to get out of that phase is have one clear product, one way of selling it, and be good at that.

John 6:19

And so, in terms of workflow and what that looks like, what should someone in the founder phase be doing day-to-day? What are the non-negotiables?

Chris 6:27

Well, I'd say the non-negotiables are like delivering their service. You're still coaching, but you're doing it with the intent of figuring out like what is actually going to help your clients. The second thing that you need to be doing every day is having more conversations with people. Because when we start this business, we're raised to think like, I don't want to be slimy, I don't want to be salesy. The reality is coaching is sales. Sales is coaching. Coaching is marketing, and marketing is coaching. And if you're very clear on who you're selling to and what your product is, you'll have less uh opportunity to feel awkward. But that still means you have to be out there starting conversations. You have to look the other parent at the soccer practice in the eye and say, hey, I'm Chris. What do you do? Oh, I run a gym. What are you doing for workouts right now? Would you like to come with me? So you have to be comfortable starting conversations going first. And then you have to be comfortable making invitations. So conversations and invitations are the two fundamental skills of the founder. If you can say to somebody, I own a gym, would you like to come with me noon on Monday? You are on your way out of the founder phase, and that skill will make you a millionaire eventually.

John 7:37

Well, it's funny you brought up marketing in the founder phase because most founders think it's just a few leads through the door solves all their problems. They can just get a couple bodies in. And uh you were no different when when you met with your first mentor. Didn't you say, like, hey, how do I get ads going or something like that? Like, what what was uh what was your first experience uh talking to a mentor about marketing?

Chris 8:02

Well, I had two locations, probably half a dozen staff, and I wasn't making any money. I was losing money and in I couldn't pay the rent that month, I couldn't pay ourselves, I couldn't pay uh our loans. And I thought that my mentor, Dennis, was going to give me marketing tips. And he said, Chris, you're not ready for marketing. If by some miracle you made the perfect marketing and that attracted exactly the people you want in your gym, the way your gym is right now, they would hate it and quit and you'd never get them back again. Don't buy ads. You're not ready. And what he convinced me to do was to fix the operational problems in my gym first, then fix my retention, and then start marketing. And he was right. But that was a very hard lesson for me. And still to this day, seven or eight times every single day, somebody sends me a DM and says, you know, if I just had 10 more customers, all my problems would go away. That is not true.

John 8:56

That's universally true. You know, every because every gym owner closes at 90%.

Chris 9:01

Yeah, exactly.

John 9:02

So what are the pitfalls in this founder phase? Like, what are the things where people like the core of the book is you should be focused. Yeah, exactly. And so where do people get distracted and maybe spend a lot of time and effort on things that really don't move the needle a lot here?

Chris 9:17

Well, they try to diversify too often. So I'm gonna launch, but I'm gonna have group and I'm gonna have one-on-one, I'm gonna have open gym, and I'm gonna have nutrition services, and I'm gonna have kids. And that's just a massive distraction. And it stops them from getting really good at selling the one thing that they can deliver on well. They overhire, or I should say, overinvest. So they they invest in too much space and they invest in too many staff and they invest in too much equipment. But the reality is that that digs them a really deep hole, and not all those things pay them back quickly enough. What kills people in the founder phase is they just they run out of time. They don't have time to make up for all their mistakes. They run out of money, you know, they they can't keep funding indefinitely. And eventually their spouse says, like, when are you coming home? And their goal is make an impact. If I have to, I guess I'll make a profit. And they never think like, gee, I better do it in a way that lets me get home for dinner, which eventually became kind of the the credo of two-brained, make an impact, make a profit, make it home for dinner. And so they think like I'm just gonna grind like this forever. And every gym owner that I've ever spoken to, and and this has to be 10,000 by now, none of them got into this for money. Money is never the reason that people start a gym, but it's always the reason people close a gym. And the fastest path to money is the simplest, most focused path of having one clear offer to one clear audience and getting really good at convincing those people to sign up.

John 10:44

What you said was great there, and I want to bring attention to it. This idea that money isn't the reason anybody starts a gym, but it's always the reason somebody closes it. So when a gym owner is out of the founder phase, is it basically like they're starting to make a little bit of money that that like when you're putting something in your pocket at the end of every month, is that when you know you've officially ascended to farmers or something else there?

Chris 11:06

Yeah, when you start taking something out of the business and it's paying you. Now you have a business, you haven't just bought yourself a job. And this usually involves hiring people because you just can't do it all yourself. So the farmer phase is really about cautiously diversifying into two or three options, hiring some staff to help you with buying back your time and taking something home for yourself. You know, I said earlier that like the nobody starts a gym to make money, everybody quits their gym because they're not making money. And they'll quite often say things like, ah, that landlord, they bumped up my rent 10%, or there's too much competition, or my coach left and he took three clients. And money solves all of those problems. Money doesn't solve every problem, but it solves the money problems. And if you're getting into this business to make an impact, you also have to make money, or you won't be around long enough to do it. But that you can't do it alone. And so in the farmer phase, you have to actually start hiring people. The biggest mistake that most fat farmer phase entrepreneurs make is they try to hire their clone. So they'll try to hire a coach and try to make that coach just like them. But of course, that's impossible because they're the best trainer in the world and nobody could measure up. What they need to do instead is buy back their time. And they start by hiring people to do the most basic things. Cleaning is a great example. So when I was first working with a mentor, the mentor said, Chris, you need to hire a cleaner. And I said, I can't afford to pay a cleaner. I'm not paying myself $12.50 an hour. Why am I paying this guy? And he said, Well, if you do what I tell you, it'll work out. And so I hired a guy, Sean, and Sean would come in at 9 p.m. and he'd start mopping and he'd follow my checklist, and I'd be sitting 20 feet away and I would write an email to my email list. I would do marketing. And the first night Sean was there, he was there for two hours. He made 25 bucks. I made 400 because I sold somebody a personal training package, and I got it. And that's what buying back your time is all about. And that's the right way to scale in the farmer phase. Unfortunately, most of us get stuck there sometimes for our entire career because we keep making the same mistakes over and over and trying to replace ourselves instead of replacing a role.

John 13:19

So in Founder, you're doing everything, you're working all the time, and you're not making any money. And to ascend to the next phase to become a farmer, you need to be bringing home a little bit of money. When you move into this farmer phase, especially in the uh initial uh time you are there, you're still working all the time, but you want to be working on more important stuff. Did I get that right?

Chris 13:44

Yeah, it's really you're looking at yourself as the biggest investment and you're trying to apply as much leverage to your time as you can because your time is finite. If you are trying to do the marketing and coach every class and do your own workouts and et cetera, you're not gonna have time to do it all. And most of the time, it's the marketing or the management stuff that suffers. This is where you grow into actually being a responsible CEO of your business, where you've finally figured out that just being the best coach or trainer in town is not gonna be enough to make you the best business owner anymore. And so you're going to apply leverage wherever you can, make the cheapest hires that you can at first, and then reapply your time to the more valuable things that will actually grow your business.

John 14:27

So basically, you would try and do a diagnostic of how you're working each day. Yeah. You'd assess and then you'd look at which tasks are the ones that you can farm out for the lowest amount of money, and you farm those out and try and replace that time with the stuff that would make you the most money.

Chris 14:44

Yeah, we do an exercise called the day in the life where you're basically tracking every minute of your day for a week. And you'll then say, okay, well, I'm going to group these tasks together. Now I know if I add up all these days, I'm spending seven hours a week mopping. If I hire for that role, it will cost me $140 a week. But if I have seven hours a week that I can put into setting up my social media funnels, making content, doing the marketing, it should easily give me a 10x return on that time. And once you've got that system in place, then you can look at buying back more time. Maybe it's hiring a front desk person or whatever that is, but you move up the ladder that way. Ultimately, the goal is to make your gym something that can support your entire family, to pay you enough that your partner doesn't really have to work, but they can if they want to. And what we want to have for you by the end of the farmer phase is a business where you can take some time off that pays you enough to cover the costs of your entire family and have a little bit left over.

John 15:43

So we talked about some of the pitfalls in the founder phase. You told a story about how uh your mentor told you if you did marketing, that would be the worst thing for your business because your service was crummy. So people would just find out that your business was crummy faster. Yeah. What is the equivalent in the farmer phase? Like where where do people go wrong here?

Chris 16:02

It's usually in overhiring and undermanaging people. And it's you have the whole business up here in your brain. You hire people to take workload off you, they can't read your mind, and so you're constantly correcting them because they're doing it wrong. Instead, you need to get the business out of your brain and onto paper. And then as you hire more staff, you can quickly say, Here's your job, here's how to do it right. And we call this making it eighth grade easy, which means you pretend that a 12-year-old is going to be taking over your business for the next two weeks, and you write a set of instructions so complete that a 12-year-old could follow them successfully. Not because your staff is dumb, not because they're lazy, not because they're gen Z or whatever we're calling them now, but because you can't see all the gaps that your brain automatically jumps. You have that experience. Eventually, what happens is you might want to hire a manager to implement your playbook or oversee it. And the big mistake here is that people think, well, I hate the marketing, I hate the sales, I'm gonna hire a manager, and I'm gonna, they're gonna do all the stuff I hate, and I'm gonna give them a lot of incentive to do it. I'm gonna give them a bonus. But a manager can't grow your business. They're hired to maintain your business. It's literally like the same word. And they can manage your staff, but they can't really improve your staff. And so often we we try to delegate or we tell ourselves we're delegating, but really we're just abdicating. We're getting the hell out of there before the bridge falls down. And that's that's a massive mistake is overhiring, undermanaging the people that you do, and then trying to replace yourself in the wrong places first.

John 17:40

There's a loop that happens here, right? You're doing the value ladder, you're replacing the low-level work with higher level work. Yeah. You're repeating that framework until I assume you're just like only doing sales and marketing and some of the coaching that you like because that's going to be the highest level work. Maybe, yeah, maybe some retention client outreach, keeping some of your highest level uh PT clients who refer people in. Like I would guess that's like the tip of the spear, the highest value stuff that you can do. What you're saying is people may want to skip a step and say, well, TwoBrain says we got to nurture these leads, and I don't like texting people. I don't like video text. I'm gonna hire, uh, I'm gonna pay someone 20 bucks an hour to do that. Yeah. And they and you've never done it, you don't understand what it takes to do that. Or uh, you know, this Facebook ad stuff is hard. So you hire an agency, but you don't know how to manage them. And so you have a position, you're in a position where you can't really hold these people accountable to the results because you don't know how to do them themselves. Or you just say, uh I need a manager now, and that person's not in a position where they're going to grow your business and you're not, and your business isn't in a position where it should be maintaining, right? It's still you're still foot on the gas at this point.

Chris 18:48

Yeah, I just don't believe you can effectively manage somebody to do something that you've never done yourself. And so if you're hiring somebody to take away a job because you're scared of it, you don't understand it, you hate it, but you can't explain it to them, then you have no way to even know if they're doing a good job. You can't evaluate them. So you have to live it yourself, you have to document it, and then you say, do it exactly like this. Now they've got a process, they've got a standard to meet, and you've got a way to see if they're actually being successful or not.

John 19:17

And so when do you know you have left the farmer phase?

Chris 19:21

When you're making a little bit more money than you need to take home and you've got a little bit of spare time. You've traded time for money, you've bought back your time, and you're saying, Hey, you know, it's Friday, I'm done all the marketing. We're good, all of our metrics are good. I'm going to the beach. That's when you enter the tinker phase. You've got a little bit more money than you need to take home, and you've got a little bit more time than you need to do your duties as CEO.

John 19:48

And so what does that mean when you've become a tinker? You just go to the beach all day.

Chris 19:52

Is that the you're at kind of a dangerous point because over the last 10 years, you have had 50 other business ideas. And now every time you go into a business, because you're learning about business, you see all their flaws and you think, I could do that better. I could run a better coffee shop than this, I could do a better carpet cleaning business than this. And in your mind, because you think I could, you suddenly think I should. And so what happens is what happened to me, the gym was doing well. I ran into a friend of mine at the gas station and he said, Where are you going? I said, I'm going for a bike ride. And he's like, Ah, you slacker. And he's another entrepreneur. And he goes, I guess the gym's doing well. I said, It is. And he's like, What are you gonna do next? And he thought that I was gonna say open another gym. And I said, You know, Robin and I are really thinking about opening a coffee shop. And he said, Why would you hate the other thing that you love? Why would you ruin that? And what he meant was that like, if I've hit this level of gym ownership, I'm in the top 10% of gym owners in the world, but I'm still in the bottom 1% of coffee shop owners. And while there is some overlap, the lessons don't directly apply. So the big risk at Tinker Phase is that you blow it, you wreck everything that you've built instead of further building and compounding your gains.

John 21:08

Yeah, I think this is the most dangerous of the phases because this is where you make the most expensive mistakes. Yeah. And even if you don't open a second location, don't open a coffee shop, we see a lot of tinkers within two brain, they'll come back and you know, try and change the model on their staff because oh, there's a better way that you can do it now, that you can, you know, basically you're the architect and not the actual doer. When in reality, like you've proven what you are doing is working, you just really need to like hone in and do it better, right? Like you just you have a golden goose. Um just get out of your way, don't kill it.

Chris 21:49

That's big. Yeah, very important. And and that does happen. Like, you know, especially it took me so long to fix my mistakes that by the time my gym was successful. It was kind of like I felt guilty or distracted. I felt like I should have something to fix. And so I would unconsciously break things. Let's rewrite the entire staff playbook. Let's change the hierarchy of staff. And that just wasn't serving anybody. In fact, it took the business backward. And so then I said, okay, Chris, you got to get out of here. Let's go start a surfboard waxing company. And of course, that harmed the business too. So the key in the tinker phase is saying, how do I extend my impact and how do I continue to feed the golden goose while creating the legacy that I'm trying to create for myself, my family, my community, my country. And that's really where Tinker leadership is important. Your mindset in the Tinker phase, especially when you first get there, is that there's going to be a lot of shiny objects, more opportunities than ever, and you need to stay focused. In the earlier phases, you're having these ideas, but you don't have any time or money. And so you're not tempted to act on them. But, you know, John, you saw me start seven, eight different companies when I was in the tinker phase, and it was usually you saying, no, no, get back on track. One product again, more conversations, more invitations. Let's stay focused and build the big thing.

John 23:12

It's a big tinker graveyard of two-brain uh side projects. So I guess why call it the tinker phase if tinkering is the last thing you should be doing in this phase?

Chris 23:24

Well, because tinker historically has basically meant like you are the person who is free to solve bigger problems, not you're gonna reinvent the wheel on the ox cart that the farmer is towing. What you should be doing in this phase is saying, like, how do we invent something to replace the ox cart or how do we invent the new medicine? And so what you should be doing here is kind of like duplicating your farm systems, opening another location, maybe pulling money out of your business and investing it in some kind of boring safety net investment, but it's definitely not let's start crypto, let's do day trading, let's buy real estate and five other things. You know, diversity is distraction. And the way that you can really make the most impact is not to have the best coffee shop and the best gym and the best garment company and the best supplement. It's to have the best and bigger gym. It's to have the best two gyms that are exactly the same. And that's the way that you really start to expand your legacy and build your wealth.

John 24:27

Yeah, because as far as two-brain's concern, we start looking at people as potential candidates for that tinker program when they're around 100,000 in net owner benefit. And the goal of our tinker program is to get them to a million dollars in net worth. What commonalities do you see amongst the gym owners who get to that million dollar net worth faster than the ones who maybe stay stuck for three, four, five years?

Chris 24:51

Well, either they're naturally focused like you or they have a forcing function for focus like me. So I use the golden hour every day. I do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. You have a knowledge, I think inherently, of like, don't do that. That's distracting you from the main thing. So it is really important from a tax perspective to get money out of your business. You got to put it somewhere. That somewhere is really important. And it should probably be a barbell strategy, like we teach, where on one end you've got like your high growth, higher risk investment, your business. And on this end, you've got like this boring set it and forget it investment, like you know, bonds or real estate, whatever. And that'll do enough to keep you focused. All the little things in between are just gonna be a distraction of your time, energy, and money.

John 25:39

And one thing that I would tack onto that, that I think a lot of tinkers miss is a fair assessment of risk, right? Because let's say you're making a hundred thousand in net owner benefit. The the next milestone that everybody gets in their head is like, okay, I want to do like 250, a quarter million. The most natural path they take is, well, my gym's making me a hundred grand now. I just open up another gym, I'm gonna have two hundred grand. But there's an insane amount of risk in opening a second location. You have to like take out a loan, get a lease. There's obligations, you're gonna personally guarantee it. When you look at like, there's a very real path to go from 100,000 in the gym you have to 200,000 in net owner benefit in the gym you have, you don't have to do anything uh that that that is risky. And so, to your point, a lot of people just like or like, I'm gonna buy the competitor down the street. It's like, because I'm a genius gym owner and that guy's an idiot. And if I just get rid of the fax machine, like this thing is gonna print money. As entrepreneurs, we're a little like tone deaf when it comes to risk. And as somebody who's been through a lot of risky situations and has opened and closed and restarted and bought and sold many businesses at this point in time, it's like a turtle in the hair, right? The the turtle, the guy who just puts his head down and grows his gym 20, 30% year after year after year after year, wakes up and says, Oh, I'm the top .0001% of gym owners. And I've been able to pocket the difference between what my lifestyle was and what it currently is over this period of time. I've just been reinvesting the difference. And wow, I got like it looks good. Like my financial situation is like unbelievable based off of where I was five years ago.

Chris 27:26

I think a key there is understanding what investment means. And way back in the founder phase, you've got to learn every dollar I spend has to bring me back three. And by the Tinker phase, that's really important because it's easy to say I'm reinvesting in my gym by buying 20 more rowers. But you have to ask yourself, how will those 20 more rowers actually bring me back another 60,000 a year in value, in income? And I think hopefully, if you've developed that skill in the founder phase, you see it really show up in the tinker phase with more value returned to you.

John 27:58

So Tinker is all about securing your future and to a large extent, securing your time.

Chris 28:03

Yeah.

John 28:04

Now, this is the part of the book that you wanted to change. So talk to me about what you do once you're financially free, you have a little flexibility in your life. What is Chief all about?

Chris 28:14

Well, originally I thought that the best way to make an impact on the world, once you reach that final phase, was just make lots of money and give it away. Because that's what we were doing. You know, Robin and I have a lot of uh charities and stuff that we support individuals, and we love the opportunity where if somebody just needs money, that we can just give them money. In fact, early um when we started to see success, I can remember that these this kid went to um cancer care and we just sent them like $5,000 to buy Xbox games and stuff. And she said to me at that time, this is the kind of rich I want to be. And that really stuck with me. But it when you're done with Tinker phase, you're not done as an entrepreneur. And what I've slowly figured out is that if you can actually create more impact by empowering other people to get to that phase with you, you multiply the amount of change that you can create in the world. And so I started studying leaders who have done that, who've gone from having a business to having a movement. And I looked at the good cases and the bad cases and said, actually, there actually there's a formula to this. There is a commonality and there's a skill set. And if you look at CrossFit, if you look at the Catholic Church, if you look at uh a couple of different brands that I share in the book, you'll see the commonalities that these leaders had. And what they're doing is they're creating a legacy, but they're also creating change that far exceeds their own personal influence. They're creating something that spreads from client to client, and their staff are out there recruiting other staff, and the clients are meeting people and bringing them into the movement that the founder will never meet themselves. And it kind of spreads without you, and it spreads without your personal intervention.

John 29:57

So you got some jingle in your pocket, a little uh more free time on your hands than you had last year. Yeah. Now that you've uh stepped down as the CEO of Two Brain, how what are you doing in the chief phase?

Chris 30:10

Well, I think that the responsibility hasn't gone away. So my duties as CEO, that's gone now. And but my responsibility to help gym owners grow so that they can change this trajectory that we're on with health and wealth in the world, that can be reversed. I truly think that for the first time in human history, we we've kind of reached this point where we can continue to extend our health span or we can go backward, which is what we're currently doing. We can continue to build the wealth of nations, or we can start going backward and regressing. And the people who are best suited who sit at the nexus of health and wealth in our economy right now are entrepreneurs. And I've got this opportunity in this platform to help them grow, to expand their influence, to turn the tide on our decreasing health. And it's my responsibility to take it. So the answer is what are you gonna do? And it's just what I've been doing for 20, 25 years, and that's helping gym owners grow. So, in in our society right now, 70, 80% of entrepreneurs stay in the farmer phase forever. But you don't have to. And I think that we all got into this to make an impact, not to make money. The thing is, though, that if your business growth is stunted, so is your ability to have an impact on people. And while maybe currently one in 10,000 entrepreneurs actually makes it to the chief phase, there's the aspirational value of knowing that it's possible, that there's a pathway, and I've shared it in this book, that hopefully we will create the number of chiefs in our culture that we actually need to turn the tide of chronic disease and polarizing wealth in our economy. It can be done. There is a roadmap, others have done it, and you can do it too.

John 32:00

And if you want to get a free copy of Founder Farmer Tinker Chief, it is free on Amazon this week, the Kindle version. So if you want to grab yours, just click the link below.